Sat, 16 Sep 2017 03:06:26 GMT

Just finished reading "V for Vendetta" and an article by Moore about the creative process and having just read a good piece of art I wonder if my mind is just too rigidly practical to make good art.
The world needs practical people, that's good in it's way, but, I do sometimes daydream and wish I could create good art that moved people.
(yeah, lots of practice, making lots of bad art, hundreds and thousands of hours etc.)

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Algorithms, the good parts

Tue, 09 May 2017 20:09:10 GMT

These are things that actually have been useful or continue to be useful to my 16 year career as a software professional.

Based on “Introduction to Algorithms” 3rd edition, (c) 2009
I had the 1st edition from 1990 when I used it in class around 2000, but all this is pretty foundational stuff that’s mostly stable over the last 20-30 years.

I Mathematical Foundations
3 Growth of Functions
This is important, everything else will refer to it

II Sorting
Sorting was a foundational bit of CS when it was taught to me, and this was taught using about a dozen different sort algorithms. But what I think actually worth learning is:
6 Heapsort - and the section on “priority queues”
8.4 Bucket Sort - when ‘close enough’ is really fast
And what I sadly don’t see in the table of contents is merge sortall of these - stacks and queues, linked lists
11 Hash Tables - yes, all of javascript and ruby and python and perl are based on this
12 Binary Search Trees - another basic concept that I think is an important alternative to hashes

VI Graph Algorithms
22 Elementary Graph Algorithms - breadth-first-search and depth-first-search are important concepts

VII
27 Multithreaded Algorithms - sooner or later this will be important - thinking about concurrent programming is more and more important as our computer systems get more multi-core and more distributed.

VIII
Appendix B: Sets, Etc
More basic structures everything will refer to. A bit thick with notation, there ought to be simpler explanations of these things. If you want a reminder about what union and intersection of sets are, look here.

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bolson

Algorithms, the good parts