Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms, The (Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science & Information Processing)

Excluding Knuth's opera (another dimension), this (AHU) is about the other and only renowned classic algorithms book, deseverdly I'd say, together with Cormen-Leiserson-Rivest's (CLR) "Introduction to Algorithms". With the difference that the first and only edition of AHU has been written 16 years before the first (of the two) editions of CLR. The two books are quite different in the language and formalism used: more formal and mathematical inclined AHU with respect to CLR. I'd say, the very classic style of his authors who have made history in the CS literature with their books (particularly 2 on algorithms and data structures, 2 on Computer Theory, 2 on Compilers, 1 on CS foundations): as these books have been used in most universities around the world for decades, they've proved to be real milestones in the education of thousands of students. The books differ also in scope, since AHU is certainly not an encyclopedic collection as CLR does, with his roughly 500 pages against 1000. In spite of this, I'd point out the following: my textbook on Algorithms was CLR, but when we got to Complexity Classes (P-NP and theory behind) we "had" to switch to AHU for the simple reason that CLR did not almost mention at all Turing Machines nor Space Complexity, without which is certainly possible to learn e.g. about NP-TIME completeness, but without which, such a path would equally certainly miss some foundamental topics of Complexity Theory. All in all, then, imo the book truly deserves 5 stars (and perhaps it would deserve a second, updated, edition too ... possibly, imho, through a bit less revolutionary revision job than they did with "Introduction to Automata Theory, Language and Computation"). As a final note, those looking for a more applicative and self-reference than an educational introductory text, could have a look at the two-volumes opera by the former Knuth's pupil, Robert Sedgewick (possibly the more consolidated C or C++ versions).

Thanks

Great classic book.

Fascinating book, that moves inch by inch. You begin by designing theoretical machines and the theoretical workload each machine can reasonably handle. Spoiler alert! Crazy math, lol. But being that its 2020, you have the ultimate answer device to help you. Smartphone. Anyway, the book has a theoretical, generic coding language called ALGOL, so if you know or are learning C language or something similar you will feel very comfortable. If not, learning a coding language will be a lot easier after reading this. I managed to get through 2 chapters in about 3 weeks. If you're not a math person, it's going to take a while to get through this but I suggest figuring out what's happening, even if you can't do the equations, before you move on. Like I understood polynomials and stuff in algebra back in high school but I still always got the answers wrong ;) This book is a jewel in my collection.

This is a book that should be on every dev's shelf. It helped me, as a recent grad, fill in the cracks left from DS/Algo class.

My graduate Algorithms class is taught by an old-school professor who uses an old transparency projector like my grade school did back in the 1980s. He pulled out this book on the first day of class. Not only is the copyright date before I was born, I'm pretty sure his copy of the book was older than me as well. It was held together by tape and a lot of love. At first I was skeptical. Sure, the basic algorithms in computer science have not changed in decades. Linked lists and binary trees are the same today as in 1976. The language is a little dated, but so far this book seems to cover everything in adequate detail. It sure has a reputation as well. I had not heard of Aho before this semester, but apparently he is a top computer scientist and has written a lot of good stuff. Regardless, I wouldn't recommend buying this (or pretty much any other) textbook unless required by your professor. There are simply too many textbooks for a given topic and none of them are particularly special.