Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms

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There's a lot more to algorithms than the useful-but-boring recipes you recite for every interview. This unique book introduces a collection of amazing algorithms that have the potential to change the way you program.

In this book, language designer and C# legend Eric Lippert explores exciting, esoteric, and exotic data structures and algorithms that will expand your programming toolbox and your horizons. You'll upend the way you think about lists, learn the algorithms behind powerful developer tools, and rethink how to handle stochastic quantities in modern programming languages.

Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms shows you how to:

• Build efficient, double-ended queues from immutable parts
• Auto-format structured text so it always looks sharp
• Generate and manipulate random numbers from custom distributions using the same tools you use for sequences
• Harness immutability to squeeze data smaller while speeding up repeated computations
• Uncover the mathematical structures underlying lists, nullables, functions, tasks, and probabilities

About the book

Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms teaches you how to solve programming challenges with lesser-known algorithmic approaches. You'll begin by examining immutable data structures?stacks, queues, deques, and unusual constructions like Hughes lists?that take on conventional assumptions about performance.

Next, you'll investigate algorithms drawn from building developer tools, from backtracking search in graph coloring to unification and anti-unification. Finally, you'll venture into randomness, developing data structures and algorithms for discrete and continuous distributions, sequence operations on probability distributions, and Bayesian reasoning.

About the reader

For working programmers who know C#, Java, Python, or similar object-oriented language. Examples in C#.

About the author

Eric Lippert designed programming languages, compilers, and other developer tools for Microsoft, Coverity, and Facebook. He's been on the design and/or implementation and/or specification teams for Visual Basic, JavaScript, VBScript, C#, Hack, and Bean Machine. Eric's popular blog about language design, data structures and algorithms, and other ?fabulous adventures in coding,? which you can read at ericlippert.com, has enjoyed a twenty-year run.