Algorithms in Java, Parts 1-4 (3rd Edition) (Pts.1-4) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have the dubious distinction of having taken a class that used this book as it's central text. The illustrations are great. The explanations of algorithms and general algorithm design concepts are clear. The code, however, is neigh unreadable in a lot of places.
This was a huge problem for me, as I had a lot of difficulty seeing a clear mapping from the concepts explained to the code examples. Sedgwick's code examples often build on previous ones to the degree that they are not understandable on their own (this is especially true with the graph algorithms in part 5). If you try to use this book as a reference you will find yourself digging much harder than you would like in order to understand code samples that are actually quite simple. You could see how this might make a programming based course difficult.

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For the first time, Sedgewick's seminal work on algorithms and data structures is available with implementations in Java. Michael Schidlowsky and Sedgewick have developed new Java code that both expresses the methods in a concise and direct manner, and also provides programmers with the practical means to test them on real applications. This particular book, Parts 1-4, represents the essential first half of Sedgewick's complete work. Its four parts are fundamentals, data structures, sorting, and searching. It has expanded coverage of arrays, linked lists, strings, trees, ADT's, and object-oriented programming.

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JavaSpaces™ Principles, Patterns, and Practice Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a great introduction to the JavaSpaces technology, making it accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of Java. The main concepts are thoroughly and simply explained and the programming examples are very well developed and easy to follow. This book would be suitable for introducing undergraduates to basic operating systems concepts such as process synchronization and interprocess communication, as well as to some of the more exciting network based applications, such as distributed transactions and collaborative applications.
It's clear that JavaSpaces technology can greatly simplify the teaching of important operating system and networking concepts such as thread synchronication and interprocess communication. As someone who has taught these courses, I've found that students have a hard time dealing with system semaphore and socket primitives. Quite often the basic concepts you're trying to teach get lost within a forest of implementation details. Not so with JavaSpaces. Check out the nicely developed Dining Philosophers and Readers/Writers examples in Chapter 4. The basic semaphore class is very simple to implement in JavaSpaces, which allows the discussion to focus on synchronization issues. Ditto for the basic Channel classes developed in Chapter 5. As all of these examples show, the use of JavaSpaces technology raises the level of abstraction, thereby making distributed programming much more widely accessible. As further evidence of this, consider the ease with which a very sophisticated internet messenger service is developed in Chapter 10. Making this kind of application accessible to undergraduates is quite impressive.
This is a great book, and I will almost certainly use it the next time I teach our networking course.

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