Book Image

C# Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

C# Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Building your own applications is exciting but challenging, especially when tackling complex problems tied to advanced data structures and algorithms. This endeavor demands profound knowledge of the programming language as well as data structures and algorithms – precisely what this book offers to C# developers. Starting with an introduction to algorithms, this book gradually immerses you in the world of arrays, lists, stacks, queues, dictionaries, and sets. Real-world examples, enriched with code snippets and illustrations, provide a practical understanding of these concepts. You’ll also learn how to sort arrays using various algorithms, setting a solid foundation for your programming expertise. As you progress through the book, you’ll venture into more complex data structures – trees and graphs – and discover algorithms for tasks such as determining the shortest path in a graph before advancing to see various algorithms in action, such as solving Sudoku. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to use the C# language to build algorithmic components that are not only easy to understand and debug but also seamlessly applicable in various applications, spanning web and mobile platforms.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Minimum coin change

The second example shown in this chapter presents a greedy algorithm to solve the minimum coin change problem, for finding the minimum number of coins to receive the amount specified as the input.

Figure 9.2 – Illustration of denominations in the case of the euro currency

Figure 9.2 – Illustration of denominations in the case of the euro currency

For example, for the coin system consisting of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 denominations, if you want to get a value of 158, you need to pick 5 coins, namely 100, 50, 5, 2, and 1. The greedy approach is very simple because you just pick the largest possible denomination not greater than the remaining amount. You perform this operation until the remaining amount is equal to 0. As you see, the algorithm does not care about the overall solution and tries to choose the best solution at each step.

The C#-based implementation is shown here:

int[] den = [1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500];
List<int> coins = GetCoins(158);
coins.ForEach(Console...