algorithms

Beside the great ideas provided in this book for problem solving, it provides a deep wisdom of for piecing some of the puzzles of our life. I recommend it.

I first ordered this book thinking it was George Polya 's book "How to solve it", then I realized it wasn't and I bought it anyway since I thought it might turn out as a "must read" book, just like Polys'a book.

One one hand it was a dissapointment, because the books are not written in the same manner and don't attact similar problelsm.

But then, this book makes you look into problems, and realize that usually we people are usually good in solving problems of the sort we learned how to (well... duh!), but surprisingly, we have a hard time solving even trivial problems if they are not placed in the context we got used to seeing them.

This book comes and tries to make things better in this department, showing you some general methods for solving problems, and also showing problems and suggested solutions along with a long discussion.

You should be able, once you've read the book and put your mind to it, to be better in understanding problems, understanding which tool to use for solving them and finally, understanding the tools enough to be able to actually solve the problem.

I enjoyed the overview of methods, and there are many such methods throughout the book (perhaps a complementary book for learning which "machine learning" methods are available these days and what sorts of problems they are useful for solving would be Tom Mitchell's "Machine Learning" book).

I wasn't sorry for buying this book. I'm happy I was fortunate enough to bump into it.

I am a computer scientist, but have gotten impatient over the years with the needless formalization that occurs in algorithmic texts. This is a delightful breath of fresh air in terms of balancing erudition with attempts to be "user friendly". If you want the latest and greatest twist to a well known technique, this book won't provide it. But it does a great job of competently and lucidly explaining the value proposition behind each optimization method and how to gradually upgrade from applying it naively to the more intricately optimized applications. Well done!