Mastering Algorithms With C, (book/cd-rom)

Useful Techniques from Sorting to Encryption

There are many books on data structures and algorithms, and some books laying out useful libraries of C functions, but this book aims to give you a unique combination of theoretical background and working code. In offering robust solutions for everyday programming tasks,
Mastering Algorithms with C avoids the abstract style of most classic data structures and algorithms texts but still provides all the information you need to understand the purpose and use of common programming techniques.

Implementations, as well as interesting, real-world examples of each data structure and algorithm, are shown in the text. Full source code appears on the accompanying disk.

Using both a programming style and a writing style that are exceptionally clean, Kyle Loudon shows you how to use such essential data structures as lists, stacks, queues, sets, trees, heaps, priority queues, and graphs. He shows you how to use algorithms for sorting, searching, numerical analysis, data compression, data encryption, common graph problems, and computational geometry. He also describes the relative efficiency of all implementations. The compression and encryption chapters not only give you working code for reasonably efficient solutions, they explain concepts in an approachable manner for people who never have had the time or expertise to study them in depth.

Anyone with a basic understanding of the C language can use this book. In order to provide maintainable and extendible code, an extra level of abstraction (such as pointers to functions) is used in examples where appropriate. Understanding that these techniques may be unfamiliar to some programmers, Loudon explains them clearly in the introductory chapters.

Contents include:

• Pointers
  
• Recursion
  
• Analysis of algorithms
  
• Data structures (lists, stacks, queues, sets, hash tables, trees, heaps, priority queues, graphs)
  
• Sorting and searching
  
• Numerical methods
  
• Data compression
  
• Data encryption
  
• Graph algorithms
  
• Geometric algorithms.

About the Author
Kyle Loudon is a software engineer at Matrix Semiconductor in Santa Clara, California, where he works with file systems and applications for memory chips. Prior to Matrix, Kyle developed platform software for embedded devices, including various wireless phones and the Apple iPod. He also led the graphical user interface group at Jeppesen Dataplan (now a part of Boeing), developed flight planning software, and created system software at IBM in the early 1990s.

For the past several years, Kyle has taught object-oriented programming using C++ at the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension, and has worked with C++ since the beginning of its widespread use in 1990. Kyle is the author of Mastering Algorithms with C, also published by O'Reilly and Associates.