4 ms·
What I seek are better resources for engineers and scientists who are self-taught developers. I, along with many of my peers, have technical schooling and deep
by philip1209 14y ago
What I seek are better resources for engineers and scientists who are self-taught developers. I, along with many of my peers, have technical schooling and deep understandings of mathematics and optimization, but ventured little outside of Matlab in undergraduate courses. Finding learning materials that are between targeting non-technical levels (e.g. "Programming Collective Intelligence") and targeting academic computer scientists (e.g. classic algorithm textbooks) has been difficult.
- tcdowney 14y agoAlthough it's not exactly math heavy, I think Steven Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual manages to bridge the gap between the "Programming Collective Intelligence" and something like Knuth's books.
- graycat 14y agoKnuth's books, i.e., TACP, are plenty easy to read: Mostly just skip the details of the math. Why skip? Because working through the details can take a lot of time, and for just using the algorithms the details usually amount to little down to nothing. The details of the math might be quite good as examples of math techniques for evaluating the execution time ('computational time complexity') of some algorithm not covered in Knuth.
- rdouble 14y agoThe best algorithms book for the self taught developer is the latest version of Sedgewick. http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/ http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/
- philip1209 14y agoGreat, thanks. I'll read it this weekend. The one book I found amazing for learning was Cracking the Coding Interview. The brief summaries of data structures followed by lots of examples and solutions helped me to develop an intuitive sense for run-times that made more academic texts approachable.