Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

By : Imran Ahmad
5 (2)
Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

5 (2)
By: Imran Ahmad

Overview of this book

Algorithms have always played an important role in both the science and practice of computing. Beyond traditional computing, the ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is an important skill that any developer or programmer must have. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to solve real-world problems but also to understand how it works. You’ll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, such as searching and sorting, with the help of practical examples. As you advance to a more complex set of algorithms, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and even work with machine learning algorithms, understanding the math and logic behind them. Further on, case studies such as weather prediction, tweet clustering, and movie recommendation engines will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally. Finally, you’ll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks. By the end of this book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals and Core Algorithms
7
Section 2: Machine Learning Algorithms
13
Section 3: Advanced Topics

The design of parallel algorithms

It is important to note that parallel algorithms are not a silver bullet. Even the best designed parallel architectures may not give the performance that we may expect. One law that is widely used to design parallel algorithms is Amdahl's law.

Amdahl's law 

Gene Amdahl was one of the first people who studied parallel processing in the 1960s. He proposed Amdahl's law, which is still applicable today and can become a basis to understand the various trade-offs involved when designing a parallel computing solution. Amdahl's law can be explained as follows:

It is based on the concept that in any computing process, not all of the processes can be executed in parallel. There...