Search in Book Reviews

What the authors seem to be trying to achieve is providing students with some idea as to what these topics are about together with some insight into ways to assess the effectiveness of a particular method. I am not sure that I would have wanted to have started an item on sorting by introducing a selection sort and then following that with a bubble sort. The later may be a good example of a poor algorithm that can be improved by some simple modifications but even when you finish you have an algorithm that is poor for general purpose sorting (even though it is exceptionally good for short lists that are generally already sorted, or at worst have a single miss-placed element).

I find the authors' decision to provide all source code in (poor) C and Ada (I cannot assess the quality of this) a curious one. This is clearly a student text and as such goes into insufficient detail to be the sole text on the subject for a course reading list. That means that, if nothing else, the price kills it dead in the water. No student that I have ever met would consider paying so much for so little, even if the presentation was outstanding (which it is not).

Sorry, this is a good idea but poorly and expensively implemented.