Book Review: Algorithms for the First Time

I had been staring at nothing but Vue.js all day long, when a seasoned (?) developer I work with said this to me:

Don’t forget the fundamentals.

Spurred on by this, I tried solving an algorithm problem, but I just couldn’t get it to work. When I stopped to think about it, I realized I couldn’t even remember what quicksort was. And to think I once studied algorithms pretty hard…

But for a working developer, it’s not easy to set aside dedicated time to study algorithms. So I decided to at least get through one easy book. After all, well begun is half done. And the book I picked up was this one, Algorithms for the First Time.

The great thing about this book is that it really reads smoothly. You can enjoy reading it even lying down. That doesn’t mean it just glosses over things with a “here’s a thing, you didn’t know about it, did you?” attitude. It keeps your brain doing the computations. What problem are you trying to solve, how should you approach it, moving from the first case to the second to the third and on to the stage of generalizing it—as you read explanations that seem to follow your stream of consciousness, you even get the illusion that you’re not reading a book but rather writing the algorithm yourself.

If I had to name a downside of this book, it would be that since it’s truly a beginner’s book, it doesn’t cover deeper content or more difficult algorithms. But you shouldn’t expect too much from a beginner’s book. After all, it’s not as if you’re going to wrap up your entire algorithm study with this single book. There are countless algorithm books thick enough to be used as weapons.

Now I’m going to buckle down and start studying algorithms again. I do have an algorithm repository I made before, but looking at it again after a year, I’ve forgotten it so thoroughly that I even doubt whether this is really code I uploaded myself… So I boldly started a new algorithm repository. Witness me!