If you don’t care to read my ramblings about this book, here’s a summary: Buy this book if you do ANY serious programming.

What makes The Algorithm Design Manual

2 main reasons I make this blatantly positive assessment:

1. The first several chapters are dedicated to the basics of data structures and common problems involving algorithms. This is obviously not a unique feature, but what is unique are the “war stories” from actual field work. The stories include discussion about the failure cases and how Skiena went about solving problems he encountered. This alone is enough to make this book worthwhile.
2. Chapters 11-18 are a giant catalogue of algorithmic problems. Again, not a unique trait. However, not only does Skiena describe the basic approaches to solving each type of problem, he includes links to different implementations of in-the-field optimized solutions. He also brings up questions you should ask yourself when choosing an implementation.

The only caveat here is that most of the examples are written in C, which can be troublesome if you don’t know or have forgotten about pointers.

You should buy this book if…

You have at least 1 year of computer science training under your belt. If you are just writing one website in PHP for your cousin’s lemonade stand; then I don’t know why have you read this far. In that case you won’t be interested in this book.

Students and professionals alike will find The Algorithm Design Manual useful. In addition to the standard problem sets, I’ve also found the accompanying interview questions to be very interesting.

The only programming book that tops this is The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.

What are some of the best Data Structures/Algorithms books you’ve found?

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I hope authors, as well as readers, will gain some insights. Here is my review of MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide.

Book Structure

The book basically takes you, step-by-step, through downloading the MooTools library parts and building simple examples with HTML, CSS, and, of course, MooTools. It seems to touch on many of major parts of MooTools: Core, DOM selection, Events, Ajax, and Fx. Finally, it introduces you to MooTools More and how to write your own MooTools plugins. it approaches everything with very simple, very “hands-on” examples. There are some deviations (like pop quizzes), but they are few.

The examples themselves generally introduce a topic, give an HTML/CSS template and then progressively fill in the MooTools bits.

The Good

You can tell that the authors are bloggers by their very informal writing style. They know how to use simple language so that their writing does not impede the learning ability of the reader. I was able to read the entire book in about 3 hours cover-to-cover, a testament to how easy-to-read it is.

This is a book that a real, never-coded-a-web-page-before dude(tte) could pick up and do something with immediately.

The Bad

It truly is a beginner’s guide, and having some sort of MooTools knowledge myself I was annoyed by the verboseness of the examples. There seemed to be a lot of times I was seeing a small code example stretched out to several pages of text.

I was slightly disappointed by the number of linguistic (spelling and grammar) mistakes throughout the book. These were obviously not cultural differences between the UK-based Packt and the US. I was always able to understand what the writer meant, but I kept getting hung up on the mistakes because that’s the kind of asshole I am ;)

I really missed a good reference or appendix section at the end where I could find links to more information about the parts of MooTools I was learning about. There was some stuff within the chapter texts, but not enough.

You should buy this book if…

… you are truly a beginning web developer. This book is a great introduction to web development with a core focus on MooTools. It seems to generally promote good web development practices in my opinion.

Conversely, this book is not great to use just for reference. If you want to lookup anything advanced, it’s not going to be your best bet.

MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide »

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