[Home Page] - [Reviews Main]

Algorithms and Data Structures in C++ by Leendert Ammeraal

ISBN: 0-471-96355-0       Publisher: Wiley       Pages: 352       Price: £24-95

Categories:   algorithms     data structures

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 8-4 (May 1996)

In the first chapter of Algorithms and Data Structures in C++Leendert lays down some of his ground rules. Such ones as 'I will assume that the user will behave reasonably' are eminently sensible in the context of this book, though insane in the context of production code.

The biggest problem that this book has is that it is being published at a cusp in the development of C++. Many programmers are still using pre-exception handling compilers (or switching it off) and expect such things as new()to return a NULL for failure rather than throwing an exception.

Chapter 1 is worth reading because it gives you a good perspective on the author's departure point. Chapter 2 focuses on a handful of arithmetic algorithms and multi-precision arithmetic. It concludes with an interesting program to compute the decimal expansion of p (you won't be able to use it to break any records, but it is more powerful than most such programs published in elementary texts.

Chapter 8 concludes with an exposition of and implementation of the Huffman Algorithm for file compression. Chapter 9 covers various aspects of mathematical graphs (nodes connected by arcs, not pretty pictures). Chapter 10 covers aspects of Combinatorial Algorithms , concluding with the Knapsack Problem and an interesting extension of it.

Chapter 11 looks at some of the problems in writing very simple interpreters and compilers.

The book concludes with an appendix containing a class for large integers.

Now, just in case you were in any doubt, I have not accidentally edited out any reference to the middle part of the book. That covers all the normal fare that you find on books about algorithms and data structures. Good clear expositions of queues, sorting and so on. But I said earlier that this book is being published at a cusp in the development of C++. Unfortunately for the author, what we will need in future is a book that relates such material to its implementation either by the STL or compatibly with the STL .

I think that Algorithms and Data Structures in C++would be an excellent book for solo programmers who do not need to produce code that will have a long compilable lifetime. It is certainly more readable than most previously published books on the subject and if you are a student struggling with an opaque academic tome this one might shed a little more light. The rest will have to wait for the next edition.