During the course of researching something.. I came across an excellent free e-book: “Data Structures and Algorithms” (http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/Data-Structures-And-Algorithms/) written by Granville Barnett and Luca Del Tongo. While it is a little difficult to follow in places, it is an excellent resource for programmers who want to “get back to basics”.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written things like Linked Lists and Sorting algorithms from scratch. This book really does a good job of laying out pseduo code for what you need to do to implement a particular algorithm.
Programming in C# has really made me lazy when it comes down to fundamental programming principals! I would be willing to bed that a lot of programmers today don’t know how to write a lot of these things from scratch anymore.. so much is provided to us to use by others.. that we forget how they’re actually built.
Using the .NET framework I have hardly had a need to do anything like write a Bubble Sort or a Linked List from scratch. I suppose that I’m fortunate as well in that I started on the .NET bandwagon late.. a lot of the functionality that is in this book is built into the framework now.
I’m currently working through each of the examples and having quite a bit of fun doing it. I created my own Singly and Doubly Linked List, from scratch. While not as powerful or efficient perhaps as the built in Linked Lists and others that are built into the framework.. It’s about learning something old, and applying it to something new. I dug up some old C code that I had written years and years ago that implemented a LL.. now I’ve done it in C# as well.
So, I’m working on getting back to basics.. relearning stuff that I learned a long time ago, and having fun implementing the algorithms in C#. It’s good exercise for the mind and is making me re-think some of the things that I’ve been writing lately. Creating these in C# is really making me think more in the OOP world.
Check out the book!
- Matthew
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