Structuring Data and Building Algorithms: An ANSI-C Based Approach - Softcover

Ian Chai; Jonathon David White

9780071271882: Structuring Data and Building Algorithms: An ANSI-C Based Approach

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071271880 ISBN 13: 9780071271882

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (Asia), 2009

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The famous mathematicians, physicist, theologian, and philosopher Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) once wrote,"If I have seen further [than certain other people], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This is very true in computer programming as well. Imagine if all programmers had to rediscover for themselves by trial and error how to solve common problems in programming! It is much better to learn the solutions that other programmers have already discovered and build upon that foundation.

This book is about those foundational solutions. It describes how to structure data and build algorithms to solve common programming tasks. Some of these techniques have names that come from ordinary non-computer life - e.g. stacks, queues and sorting - and others have names that might be completely unfamiliar to a new student of the programming - e.g. recursion, backtracking and arrays. Occasionally, a new tool is discovered , or at least, refined but most of the techniques in this book are standards in the programmer's tool chest.

Unlike the majority of textbooks in this field, this book takes a"code first" approach. After a brief introduction of the concepts, a short complete ANSI-C program is presented for students to analyse. A number of questions arising from the code are then posed and answered in the Socratic format. In this way, the reader will not only become fluent in the concepts but also in the nuts and bolts of translating these concepts into functioning, efficient standard C code. Variable pointer diagrams are developed and used extensively to aid understanding of the more complex data structures and their manipulation.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," as the saying goes, and what more a movie? the animation movies on the accompanying CD-ROM illustrate different data structures and algorithms, making concepts which may be difficult to grasp on paper easier to understand.

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About the Author

Ian Chai was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but has since lived in many other place. Sent to boarding school in Singapore when he was 14, he received his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Kansas. After that, he worked in Ulm, Germany for a research institute - where he got baptised in the Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut, before finishing up a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Finally returning to Malaysia, he is now a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering at the Cyberjaya campus of Multimedia University. He is married to Juliane and they have two daughters, Joni and Hannah.

Jonathon David White was born in Oakville, Canada but has since lived in many other countries. Even during his undergraduate days at McMaster University, he already had a cosmopolitan outlook on life, being active in the Chinese Christian Fellowship. After obtaining his M. Div from Trinity International University in the USA, and Ph.D. from McMaster University in Canada, he worked and taught in China, Japan, Malaysia (Multimedia University) and finally Taiwan - where he had earlier met and married Wu Xiuman. They have one daughter, Aien (Charity Grace) and two sons, Youen (Johann Donald) and Lien (leon Joshua). They now reside in Taoyuan, Taiwan where he is teaching at Yuan Ze University in the Department of Electro-Optical Engineering.

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