Summary

You’ve just completed the second chapter of this book, which was all about data structures and algorithms in the C# language. This time, we focused on algorithms and indicated their crucial role in the development of various applications, regardless of their types.

First, you learned what an algorithm is and where you can find algorithms in your daily life. As you saw, algorithms are almost everywhere and you use and design them without even knowing it.

Then, you learned about notations for algorithm representation. There, you learned how to specify algorithms in a few ways, namely in a natural language, using a flowchart, via pseudocode, or directly in a programming language.

Next, you learned about a few different types of algorithms, starting with the recursive algorithms that call themselves to solve smaller subproblems. Then, you learned about divide and conquer algorithms, which divide the problem into three stages, namely divide, conquer, and combine. Next, you learned about back-tracking algorithms, which allow you to solve problems consisting of a sequence of decisions, each depending on a decision that’s already been taken, together with the backtrack option if the decisions do not provide a correct solution. Then, you learned about greedy algorithms, which choose the best option in each step of their operation while not being concerned about the overall solution. Another group you learned about was heuristic algorithms for finding near-optimal solutions. Then, you learned that you can optimize recursive algorithms using dynamic programming and its top-down and bottom-up approaches. Finally, you learned about brute-force algorithms.

The final part of this chapter looked at computational complexity in terms of time and space complexity. Asymptotic analysis, together with Big-O notation, was presented.

In the next chapter, we’ll cover arrays and various sorting algorithms. Are you ready to continue your adventure with data structures and algorithms in the C# language? If so, let’s go!