For the special algorithms and data structures in the college texts, do I need to know that material in my "daily job" writing software? A little! So far mostl

For the special algorithms and data structures in the college texts, do I need to know that material in my "daily job" writing software? A little! So far mostly the material from those books has been available to me in the code written by others, some of the famous open source code and in Microsoft's .NET. There is a case where I exploited the heap data structure (that is, as in heap sort) to create an efficient priority queue, and I didn't find code for that ready to use by others. There is a case where I might take k-D trees (finite dimensional trees for essentially a multi-dimensional version of binary search) and modify it to get an algorithm I might need, but so far I haven't. Generally we have to expect that what was in D. Knuth's TACP in the 1960s and commonly useful now has been put into libraries for use by others. This is a common situation: For the simplex algorithm for optimization, rarely would it be advisable to try to code up a version yourself. Instead get a copy of C-PLEX, the IBM OSL (Optimization Subroutine Library) or some other respected code. Then knowing how simplex works would be helpful, but not because want to code the algorithm from scratch yourself. The core of my work is some new work in algorithms, but those algorithms would not be good candidates for a library for general use. So, yes, I work with algorithms occasionally but mostly don't code the ones in the college texts.