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

Practical Applications

The ability to efficiently and accurately search data in a given data repository is critical to many real-life applications. Depending on your choice of searching algorithm, you may need to sort the data first as well. The choice of the right sorting and searching algorithms will depend on the type and the size of the data, as well as the nature of the problem you are trying to solve. 

Let's try to use the algorithms presented in this chapter to solve the problem of matching a new applicant at the immigration department of a certain country with historical records. When someone applies for a visa to enter the country, the system tries to match the applicant with the existing historical records. If at least one match is found, then the system further calculates the number of times that the individual has been approved or refused in the...