(Part 3) Reddit mentions: The best algorithms and data structures books

Quit applying for jobs online. Actually go to job fairs and meet people face to face. See if local universities will allow non students into their job fair. Out of the four jobs I've had, I only applied for two of those were from meeting people face to face at a job fair. I've probably applied for about seventy jobs online since I started working and of those I only interviewed at one and I turned it down because the money wasn't good enough.

Seriously, $35K is a cap in India, not the US. Either your boss has mind fucked you into thinking you can't do any better or you haven't been marketing yourself properly.

Here is a list of things that can help you get a better job

• Be willing to move. If not, look for remote jobs.
  
• Make sure your resume is only one page. I don't care if you're the President of the United States and you wrote fifty papers and cured Ebola while proving P = NP. One page, one side, PDF format, in a font no smaller than 10. That being said, feel free to put hyperlinks to allow the interviewer to decide if they want to dig in more.
  
• Get a LinkedIn profile and aggressively solicit recommendations from coworkers
  
• Get a stackoverflow profile and start answering some questions
  
• Build something stupid or fun and make it public on Github. Or knock out some bugs on an open source project in a area that interests you.
  
• Start studying for interviews now. That way, when you get a call (and you will get them if you really have a comp sci degree) you'll be ready for the interview. If you suck at interviewing it will take some practice so don't wait until you have an interview lined up to study. This is a great book for it.
  

Oh yes, I can finally buy that differential geometry and spectral theory book. You are awesome for pointing this out OP.

I've been salivating over this for a while now...

And I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good intro differential geometry book from this set? It is the one subject I wish I knew better :).

since you are a computer science student, you can start with proofs in Discrete Mathematics fo this you can look at Kenneth Rosen's book, it can help you with a lot of basic concepts, constructing proofs. Its a good book for those who want to go in algorithms or theoretical cs or a even want to work on pure maths problems. I had this same confusion I wanted to do maths but also cs with it. After this you can try "The art of computer programming"(this has 4 volumes) by Donald Knuth but CLRS is a must along with Rosen's if you want to take cs and maths side by side. If you want to explore further you can look at Design of Approximation Algorithms and Randomised Algorithms. These book can help you with concepts of probability, number theory, geometry, linear algebra etc. But then if you want pure math problems then search for them, go though different journals, SIAM and Combinatorica are really good ones, search them pick a problem you like, then find text relevant to problem and try to give better solutions.

I've had the experience where I was turned down for a $80k/y job because they straight up didn't like me and I passed a $155k/y interview with a palindrome check question.

As software guys I think to one degree or another we're all on some sort of a spectrum :) What makes you good at this job is always going in 100%, all-or-nothing, winner-take-all and the reality of the matter is that it's not actually like that. Don't take a single loss like that's going to be your life now. It's a little easier to see if you come from the background I come from (immigrant) but I get it.

Imagine that you fail 5 more interviews and then, after that, you are guaranteed to make 200k working 30 hours remotely (it happens)

You can now go live your life anywhere on the planet and crush it. It just has to be 5 though, not 4. If you imagine this to be true, you'll suddenly see how that lifts you out of your negative frame of mind.

Meanwhile, focus on things you can control:

• Read Elements of Programming Interviews in Python (or whatever flavor you prefer) because it's a very comprehensive book that's easily accessible
  
• Coding problems in Ruby is also good and very succinct (if you care about Ruby, but it's thorough)
  
• Exercise
  
• Hang out with friends, get different perspectives like on this forum, although reddit in general is very negative and cancerous
  
  Work on that, remain focused and next thing you know you'll be off the market
  
  Edit: Also check out The Senior Software Engineer and Designing Data-Intensive Applications because those are key to everything but "leetcode" stuff.

algorithms and complexity by herbert wilf

this is a great book that, to my understanding, evolved out of an advanced, but introductory, undergraduate course in algorithms and complexity. it's written well, and it's not over a thousand pages like the other suggestions. the first edition is available here for free.

I've heard good things about The Algorithm Design Manual. I personally really got a lot from Algorithms in a Nutshell. As the name implies, it's a small book, but quite good.

I know you requested data structures, but the two subjects are closely intertwined: a given data structure often exists to support an algorithm and vice versa.

This would be the right place to post a reference to these two books ;-)

1. How to Think about Algorithms
   
   
2. Compared to what? An introduction to the analysis of Algorithms
   
   In my opinion, what is important is to learn how to derive an algorithm given some knowledge of the principles/techniques from classes of algorithms. The above two books are a great help in that regard.
   
   
   

Proving algorithms is much harder than coding algorithms. I think you should get good at doing the analysis yourself. It is a very valuable skill.

There are entire books dedicated to string matching. Maybe something similar to your idea is in one of them.

Here are a couple:
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Strings-Trees-Sequences-Computational/dp/0521585198/

https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Strings-Maxime-Crochemore/dp/1107670993/

Also, in the C code, why are you starting the clock before the “start of program” print statement (instead of after)? Printing text to the screen is a slow process and will add a lot of time to the clock.

I've always had tons of lady friends. When I was younger, I would hang out with this one girl and we'd play with her dolls and stuff. My mom saw that and assumed that meant I wanted girl toys. For my birthday, my gift was basically this. It's just some little electronic barking dog thingy. Literally, I cried myself to sleep because I thought my parents thought I was a girl. :(

Edit: If I win, I'd like this book.

>Point me to one page explanations of them and I'll be amazed by them too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_algorithms

Take your pick, each of the links on that page is to a brief summary explanation, and many of them will probably be "amazing" to relatively new/less widely-experienced programmers.

EDIT: Also, there are a host of standard reference books with a plethora of such things in them: Sedgewick's is a classic, then there is Wirth's Algorithms and Data Structures which used to be considered a "must read" for anyone in the profession, and then there are more recent things, like O'Reilly's nice little handbook/guidebook

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.com

amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

If you want to tackle C + systems programming, try writing a UNIX shell. Linux Application Development offers a guide/exercise to do that.

Writing a shell isn't tricky or impressive, but it does give you solid grounding in C for later projects.

Also if you want something algorithm extensive: a prime number generator for arbitrary precision numbers (think 1024 or 2048 bit) including the underlying library (see Prime Numbers: a computational perspective), and you can add RSA encryption/decryption on top of that if you want, and possibly a shell like bc.

This book was very good, highly recommend getting it.

https://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Algorithms-Made-Easy/dp/1468101277/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1487111396&sr=8-2&keywords=data+structures+and+algorithms+made+easy

I read this book when Java 8 first came out and thought it was pretty good.

Java 8, The Fundamentals

James Gentle's Matrix Algebra covers a lot of what you're looking for. Chapter 4 is a pretty concise one on matrix calculus, but the rest might serve better as a reference book.

Maybe not so much a great source of interview questions, but if you really want to up your knowledge of bits, bytes, and a lot of neat things you can do really fast with bitwise operations, Hacker's Delight is a must read.

I would recommend this book. There is a 2nd edition which deals with data structures in C++ as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Using-Aaron-Tenenbaum/dp/0131997467

I like that term too. Even in books 20+ years old (like this one) it was called VOP. However, nowadays the Haskell community emphasizes composition over immutability.

https://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Using-Aaron-Tenenbaum/dp/0131997467

And 100% sure that the ansi c first edition book is not free.

https://www.amazon.es/Algorithms-Data-Structures-Niklaus-Wirth/dp/0130220051