On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Richard A. Cini wrote: MIT OpenCourseware http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/ Free university courses! -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

The absolute, bar none, best book I own is "Data Structures" by Reingold and Hansen. It contains mostly mathmatically proven "best algorithms", or "standard time-proven algorithms" at the least. These particular algorithms are language independent, and are used over and over and over again in the real world. Full chapters each are given to lists (graphs & trees, doubly linked lists), searching, sorting, and memory management. While the algorithms are presented in language independent terms, the pseudo code they use is similar to C or PL/1. Unfortunately *sigh* many times these days I've seen programmers write cocktail sorts, being that is the extent of their sorting algorithm skills. Interesting to note, their N-way polyphase sort-merge is at the heart of the "SELECT" statement in Pick (Prime Information, Universe, etc. etc.). This book is simply put, the heart of complex software design. Their algorithms for tree/network traversal made it into the critical path determination code I wrote for a construction package that was later used to build some major landmarks in St. Louis. The programmer who wrote the initial draft, not using the above standard tree traversal algorithms, his code took about 24 hours to run and calculate the critical path and backward/forward float times. He was a very good programmer, but not formally compsci trained. I changed his internal algorithm to the one used in the above book, and it went down to about 20 minutes :) It's ALL about the algorithm. Another extremely good standard book is "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman. This book is very similar to the above in quality and material coverage - albeit obviously targeted at compiler design techniques, lexical and syntax analysis, symbol table generation, etc. If you're into compilers, this is "The Book". Even if you're NOT in to writing language processors, the algorithms in this book are very germane to general computer programming. Lastly, the third book on the "hallowed" section of my bookshelf is "The Design of the Unix Operating System", by Bach. While this book is clearly targeted at unix internals, again, the algorithms it presents are timeless and used in many more things than just OS design. For C programming, I have no good suggestions. There was one book that finally made it "click" for me, but I can't remember the name. The book I'm thinking of made a point of starting with only the built in statements of C (there's only about 11). Then they went into pointers and functions much later. Most books I tried first hit you with pointers and library functions way too early, scaring people off IMHO. My own two millidollars worth. Jay West ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard A. Cini" <rcini(a)optonline.net> To: "CCTalk (E-mail)" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 8:45 PM Subject: OT: good CS textbooks for a DIYer