Introduction to Algorithms

While reading the first chapter of this book, you learned about various data types. Now, it is high time to introduce the topic of algorithms. In this chapter, you will take a look at their definition, as well as some real-world examples, notations, and types. As you should take care of the performance of your applications, the subject of computational complexity of the algorithms, including time complexity, will also be presented and explained.

First, it is worth mentioning that the topic of algorithms is very broad and complex. You can easily find a lot of scientific publications about them on the internet, published by researchers from all over the world. The number of algorithms is enormous and it is almost impossible to even remember the names of all the commonly used ones. Of course, some algorithms are simple to understand and implement, while others are extremely complex and almost impossible to understand without deep knowledge of algorithmics, mathematics, and other dedicated field of science. There are also various classifications of algorithms by different key features, and there are a lot of types, including recursive, greedy, divide-and-conquer, back-tracking, and heuristic. However, for various algorithms, you can specify the computational complexity by stating how much time or space they require to operate with the increasing size of a processed input.

Does this sound overwhelming, complicated, and difficult? Don’t worry. In this chapter, I will try to introduce the topic of algorithms in a way that everyone can understand, not only mathematicians or other scientists. For this reason, in this chapter, you will find some simplifications to make this topic simpler and easier to follow. However, the aim is to introduce you to this topic and make you interested in algorithms, not create another research publication or book with a lot of formal definitions and formulas. Are you ready? Let’s get started!

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What are algorithms?
• Notations for algorithm representation
• Types of algorithms
• Computational complexity