New Algorithms Text
This year, the Algorithms course at Mudd is using a new book, written by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou (the complexity theorist), and Vazirani (the quantum computing guy). You can view a July 2006 draft of the book, which actually looks pretty nice. It doesn’t cover all that I think an algorithms course should (in particular it handles the standard data structures cursorily at best), but it definitely skips the boring bits and goes right to the fun parts. It starts out with cryptography, then goes into matrix multiplication and the FFT (which sound boring, but are actually pretty neat problems). It even has a chapter on quantum computing!
I don’t think this will ever replace CLRS in terms of completeness, but it’s a lot more fun. Definitely worth a read if you’re looking for an algorithms textbook. and really, who isn’t looking for one these days?
re: the title of my journal.
For almost a year now, every title has been a lyric from a musical, that one included. ^_^
Well, I still don’t think that one suited you. :-)