"Programming Algorithms" Book Freely Available

The book "Programming Algorithms (A comprehensive guide to writing efficient programs with examples in Lisp)" has been completed. It turned out to be more than 360 pages in a standard technical book format, with over 100k words (that's 2 NanoWriMos :). It covers more than 100 topics that made it to the TOC — but, actually, more. Phew, making it to this point was quite a challenge...

This book is, surely, not perfect. Hopefully, most of the mistakes in it were fixed with the help of many nice people who commented on the chapters as they were published on my blog.

Also, the book is terribly incomplete. Almost every chapter could be expanded by a factor of two or three with relevant details and concrete implementations of some of the general ideas that are presented, currently. But neither did I have the time to write those down, nor, what's much more important, anyone would have had the time to read them, in entirety. I believe I have put enough concrete examples with executable code to illustrate all the important concepts in each part. This is a great advantage of using Lisp for the book: the code is clear and compact enough to serve both to explain the algorithms and to permit testing them for real, in the REPL. The main compromise each author has to make is between brevity and completeness. I hope that I made the right choices in this regard, but, for sure, there's much more to learn about every piece of technology mentioned. My hope is that the book lays a solid groundwork to facilitate further deeper exploration.

There are also a couple of topics that I would like to cover but couldn't find a good place for them. Probabilistic data structures is the most important of them. Yet, they are not big enough to justify a separate chapter and, also, don't fit into any of the existing chapters.

But enough with the whining :) In fact, I'm quite satisfied with the end result as my main goal was to sufficiently develop the following key themes:

• The main one, obviously, was the description of all the important data structures and the associated algorithms.
• The next, also very important, was the demonstration of the essential tools that help in the development, testing, and verification of the produced algorithmic code: tracing, profiling, pretty-printing, etc.
• We have also discussed, when it was relevant, the real-world engineering considerations and constraints that influence the programs using our algorithms. And sometimes these constraints have more impact than the purely theoretical complexity calculations.
• Finally, in each chapter, I tried to present the practical use case of the algorithms we have studied, showing the broad variety of such applications. In fact, it spans all the different corners of the software landscape we're used to. We have talked, albeit briefly, about such different domains as neural networks, plagiarism detection, web search, mapping, chess-playing, image compression, and many others.

There is a lot of books on algorithms, but I haven't seen any that primarily aims to bridge the gap between the theory and practice. This is one of the key distinctions of "Programming Algorithms". It is definitely not the best exposition of the theoretical ideas, but I hope that, instead, it builds sufficient understanding and skill, for the common developer, to start writing efficient algorithmic programs.

I wanted to finish the book with the following statement: programming craft is primarily about making choices. What approach to prefer, which algorithm to choose, what tradeoffs to make. And, at the other level, what properties to give more priority: speed or safety, brevity or consistency, space or debuggability, clarity or conciseness, and so on and so forth. Lisp is one of the few languages that are "pro-choice". Its authors understood very well the importance of freedom to make the critical choices, and it is felt in the design of the language. For instance, with the help of declaim we can even signal our preferences to the compiler, to some extent, at the level of a single file or even an individual form. (declaim (optimize (speed 3) (safety 1) (debug 0) (compilation-speed 0))) will ask the compiler to produce the fastest possible code. Yes, this language will not guard you against poor choices like some others claim to do. Sometimes, you're not wise enough to make a correct choice, but, much more often, every choice just has its pros and cons, so someone will approve of it and someone won't. And that's what freedom is about: ownership and responsibility. So, use Lisp if you liked it. And if you prefer other languages, I'd urge you to still take advantage of the concept of freedom of choice in programming. Don't be constrained by the prevailing paradigms and try to use the best parts of all the different approaches you know...

Acknowledgments

Finally, the most pleasant part. I'm very thankful to those who helped me in the work on "Programming Algorithms" by providing support, advice, corrections, and suggestions. First of all, many thanks to my wife Ksenya who encouraged me to work on it despite the time for that is, in part, taken from my family duties. Also, I am very grateful to Dr. Robert Standh who humbly volunteered his help as an editor to make it sound more native (as my English is far from perfect since I'm not a native speaker) and point out the mistakes that I made. He and his wife had contributed lots of improvements to more than half of the chapters, and I tried to follow their advice in the subsequent ones. Thanks to Rainer Joswig for commenting on the Lisp choices. Thanks to @dzenicv on reddit who posted links to almost all of the chapters there, which triggered some helpful discussions. Thanks to @tom_mellior on Hacker News for pointing a serious deficiency in the explanation of Union-Find. Thanks to all those people who shared the links to the chapters, contributed their comments and attention.

If you've found the book helpful and interesting, you can also support it's past and (potential) further development in several ways. First and foremost, you can share it with your friends, colleagues, social network. The book was made free and will remain free as its main premise, for me, was to spread the knowledge gathered inside. Yet, you can also make a donation at Leanpub if you believe that it has brought you some value. Last but not least, if you find some way the book can be improved, don't hesitate to contact me.

Finally, I wanted to solicit reviews: if you've read the book and liked it, please, write a paragraph or two to let others know your opinion!