Viewing profile — jefferickson

It's a fantastic book, but it's not worth $186.65.

Well, I can tell you why I think my book is not good for that — it isn't designed to be that! My book grew out of lecture notes that I wrote for my algorithms classes at Illinois. …

Thanks for the kind feedback. I'm glad I could help!

> the style seems more targeted towards someone with a bunch of time reading through it slowly rather than gulping it down quickly like for most undergraduate courses. Yep. That's …

The book evolved from lecture notes that I've been publicly posting since at least 2005.

> And there it is, your argument comes down to gatekeeping Bullshit. If you want to play basketball in the NBA, you have to practice your ass off to develop the necessary skills. I…

Thanks for the kind feedback!

Not any more; see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096052

> I'm happy to see that the top comment is about his 25% credit for I Don't Know. That willingness to fold with grace is something that gets lost with standardized testing I'm afra…

> See also https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms for more learning resources, practice problems, visualizations, etc. Oooo, nice. Thanks for the link!

Nope. It's Bitstream Charter.

> I think the ideal would be something like an autograder, rather than a solution Me too! But I don't know how to write a useful auto-grader for free-form English text and pseudoco…

> OTOH, just because something is free doesn't mean that people can't criticize, IMO. I couldn't agree more!

Nobody learns learn how to design algorithms from flash cards. Mastering any skill requires sustained practice: driving writing, basketball, auto repair, carpentry, banjo, gardenin…

Hi, I'm the author. You're of course welcome not to recommend my book to anyone for any reason. But in my own defense, my reluctance to release solutions is not a moral stance, or …

No, I've had several students answer "I don't know" to every question on the final exam. (About one every two or three years.) Without exception, they got a 25% on the exam and an …

Oops. I'd say submit a bug report, but as of yesterday it become moot. As others have said, the copyright notice is only a courtesy/reminder. I've held the copyright on all this st…

You can get an EPUB and MOBI versions from the Internet Archive (auto-converted from my uploaded pdf), but I can't vouch for its quality. All the fonts are baked into the PDF, so i…

Not so much in the book itself, but definitely in the "Director's Cut" notes on the book web site. I cover bloom filters and the like in my more advanced algorithms courses. Teachi…

Exactly. The students should be the masters, not the theorem.

Yep, all this. Let me add two more points: - Own your past mistakes. They happened. Don't pretend they didn't. Figure out the underlying cause of those mistakes, and gather EVIDENC…

I'm not sure I can answer that question for anyone but myself. I've worked through quite a few pieces of TAOCP when I've needed to understand a particular topic, but I always find …

Day made!!

"Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest paths can be seen as DP" Really? Sure, if the graph is a dag, but then Dijkstra is overkill. Hmm. I'll have to think about this one. +1 for the O…

Forget about efficiency for the moment and focus on discovering the underlying recursive problem. LOTS of people struggle with dynamic programming. But in my experience, 90% of the…