I'm about to graduate comp sci and have realized that the skillset that I have gained are woefully inadequate for the job market in my area.
Most comp sci programs are not intended to be geared towards teaching you trade skills
You're more or less expected to be doing significant learning and development on your own
I did not learn a goddamn thing from my college classes. I got more use out of google than any of my professors.
Eh, I learned a lot of valuable, cross-technology core concepts in school that are never going to go out of date. I think the way Comp Sci is structured right now, heavy on theory and expect you to pick up an interesting looking language and technology and learn it on your own, is more or less ideal.
I didn't always to feel that way, but now that I've been in the industry for a few years I've had the "pleasure" of working with the alternative; guys who went to 2 or 4 year trade colleges and got a thorough training in .Net -- and zero theory.
These are the guys who ask me things like "Why'd you tell me to use a hashtable for this? I already have it in a list, and that whole [] operator thing is just like list.find()". Guys who I was determined to be senior to more or less immediately after I got hired out of school.
And then their eyes develop an idiot glaze while I try to explain why O(1) lookup vs O(n) would be a good idea on these 5 million records.
I don't think printf provides a way to pad leading zeros onto floating points. The syntax for controlling leading zeros on ints controls trailing zeros on floats
So. Does anyone know an easier, or at least better documented, way of doing real-time synthesis in Python? In particular, I need to do additive FM synthesis.
Well, after more searching of my own, there really isn't a very good solution for this yet! There's the completely undocumented and arcane Csound, and there's unofficial and similarly unfinished/undocumented support for SuperCollider. It's really a tribute to Python's "batteries included" philosophy and huge third-party module library that my reaction is shock. :P I'm really used to there being a nice, tidy library for anything I could wish.
Oh well. So, I'm going to resort to using high-quality samples of chimes/tubular bells. It won't be as flexible as synthesis, but it'll still accomplish my basic goal. It'll take a while to gather up a good collection of samples, but I do know they're out there... and there are plenty of commercial packs targeted at musicians, too, if it comes to that.
Could you not rent a mic and a basic mixer, run the line out into your line in, and sample some basic chimes? Then modify them as necessary via something like audacity? And use that as your sample library? I don't know, I just bet it'd be fun to actually make the sounds you're looking for yourself and go from there.
Chances are, unless you've got experience with audio recording, this will just end up with something that sounds worse and costs more than just buying high-quality samples.
#include "stdio.h"
int main()
{
float num = 0.55f;
printf("%05.2f \n", num);
return 0;
}
so normally this prints (%f)
0.55000000
%.2f truncates to two decimal places (you already got that) and gives:
0.55
now, the padding number is not a number to specify how many spaces to add to a number, but specifies the total length of the print out (in characters) so doing %5.2f gives me 5 characters to work with, and puts a space on the left for any unused space, like so:
_0.55 (I had to use an underscore to show the space)
so now, adding a 0 will cause 0s to fill the space, so %05.2f gives
00.55
It looks like the main problem was that you assumed the first pad number was the number of pad spaces, when in fact it specifies the minimum number of characters that print takes up, if the string takes up more spaces than designated, no padding is added to the left.
Part of my new years goal is to expand my programming chops
Starting with smalltalk and using squeak IDE. It sure is a fun environment to play in. Not sure if I'll realistically use it for anything, but a couple of books I have read so far have recommended it to build some good habits.
Starfuck on
jackfaces
"If you're going to play tiddly winks, play it with man hole covers."
- John McCallum
Smalltalk manages to be both incredibly awesome and have almost no commercial use. I blame the image-based persistence concept. It hurt a lot of Lisp implementations, too.
But for all its relative lack of use nowadays, it heavily influenced a number of later languages; Objective-C, Ruby, Python, etc.
I'm about to graduate comp sci and have realized that the skillset that I have gained are woefully inadequate for the job market in my area.
Most comp sci programs are not intended to be geared towards teaching you trade skills
You're more or less expected to be doing significant learning and development on your own
I did not learn a goddamn thing from my college classes. I got more use out of google than any of my professors.
Eh, I learned a lot of valuable, cross-technology core concepts in school that are never going to go out of date. I think the way Comp Sci is structured right now, heavy on theory and expect you to pick up an interesting looking language and technology and learn it on your own, is more or less ideal.
I didn't always to feel that way, but now that I've been in the industry for a few years I've had the "pleasure" of working with the alternative; guys who went to 2 or 4 year trade colleges and got a thorough training in .Net -- and zero theory.
These are the guys who ask me things like "Why'd you tell me to use a hashtable for this? I already have it in a list, and that whole [] operator thing is just like list.find()". Guys who I was determined to be senior to more or less immediately after I got hired out of school.
And then their eyes develop an idiot glaze while I try to explain why O(1) lookup vs O(n) would be a good idea on these 5 million records.
This right here is why Comp Sci is important.
If you're not doing this, and your school is focusing on technologies and languages instead of theory and patterns, get out.
Which runs on a loop. Time is declared as a double.
Then I try to do a comparison
if(time == 0.00)
But this seems to never fire. Ever.
I've tried, 0.00f, 0.000000 (which is how it prints in the console) as well... no dice.
Thoughts?
*edit* oops, time is a double.
Assuming you're not allowing negative time, you can just convert it to:
if(time<=0.00f)
Floats/doubles can be a little fuzzy when you end up on a number that has no exact binary representation. You can add 0.01 and 0.03 and end up with 0.040000000001, for example. If you need to test for time being equal to zero, and you're allowing for negative time, you can convert to integer/long. So a countdown from 1 second to 0 by hundredths could simply count down from 100 to 0 by 1s, essentially reserving the single and tens digits as quasi-decimals.
I was lucky enough at my first job to work with real computer engineer and science grads who taught me the real stuff.
The thing about trade schools is that even the stuff they teach (language/platforms) is taught badly. 95% of what I know I learned on the job. Maybe 3 classes in my bachelors degree actually helped me at all.
Assuming you're not allowing negative time, you can just convert it to:
if(time<=0.00f)
Floats/doubles can be a little fuzzy when you end up on a number that has no exact binary representation. You can add 0.01 and 0.03 and end up with 0.040000000001, for example. If you need to test for time being equal to zero, and you're allowing for negative time, you can convert to integer/long. So a countdown from 1 second to 0 by hundredths could simply count down from 100 to 0 by 1s, essentially reserving the single and tens digits as quasi-decimals.
Yeah, comparing floating point with == is tricky as is, here you don't even have a reason to guarantee that you'll be "close" to 0 let alone exactly.
As Netranger showed, you care more about crossing zero than equaling zero, right?
I'm about to graduate comp sci and have realized that the skillset that I have gained are woefully inadequate for the job market in my area.
Most comp sci programs are not intended to be geared towards teaching you trade skills
You're more or less expected to be doing significant learning and development on your own
I did not learn a goddamn thing from my college classes. I got more use out of google than any of my professors.
Eh, I learned a lot of valuable, cross-technology core concepts in school that are never going to go out of date. I think the way Comp Sci is structured right now, heavy on theory and expect you to pick up an interesting looking language and technology and learn it on your own, is more or less ideal.
I didn't always to feel that way, but now that I've been in the industry for a few years I've had the "pleasure" of working with the alternative; guys who went to 2 or 4 year trade colleges and got a thorough training in .Net -- and zero theory.
These are the guys who ask me things like "Why'd you tell me to use a hashtable for this? I already have it in a list, and that whole [] operator thing is just like list.find()". Guys who I was determined to be senior to more or less immediately after I got hired out of school.
And then their eyes develop an idiot glaze while I try to explain why O(1) lookup vs O(n) would be a good idea on these 5 million records.
This right here is why Comp Sci is important.
If you're not doing this, and your school is focusing on technologies and languages instead of theory and patterns, get out.
No, the school sin't teaching technologies and languages and IS teaching the theory, but it never really crossed my mind that the leap from theory to job would be as great as it is. I had an interview a few weeks back for an entry level Programmer Analyst position, and they commented that I was taking some pretty heavy courses (AI, Compiler Theory, O/S) when thats just par for the course. Kind of tipped me off.
I'm about to graduate comp sci and have realized that the skillset that I have gained are woefully inadequate for the job market in my area.
Most comp sci programs are not intended to be geared towards teaching you trade skills
You're more or less expected to be doing significant learning and development on your own
I did not learn a goddamn thing from my college classes. I got more use out of google than any of my professors.
Eh, I learned a lot of valuable, cross-technology core concepts in school that are never going to go out of date. I think the way Comp Sci is structured right now, heavy on theory and expect you to pick up an interesting looking language and technology and learn it on your own, is more or less ideal.
I didn't always to feel that way, but now that I've been in the industry for a few years I've had the "pleasure" of working with the alternative; guys who went to 2 or 4 year trade colleges and got a thorough training in .Net -- and zero theory.
These are the guys who ask me things like "Why'd you tell me to use a hashtable for this? I already have it in a list, and that whole [] operator thing is just like list.find()". Guys who I was determined to be senior to more or less immediately after I got hired out of school.
And then their eyes develop an idiot glaze while I try to explain why O(1) lookup vs O(n) would be a good idea on these 5 million records.
This right here is why Comp Sci is important.
If you're not doing this, and your school is focusing on technologies and languages instead of theory and patterns, get out.
No, the school sin't teaching technologies and languages and IS teaching the theory, but it never really crossed my mind that the leap from theory to job would be as great as it is. I had an interview a few weeks back for an entry level Programmer Analyst position, and they commented that I was taking some pretty heavy courses (AI, Compiler Theory, O/S) when thats just par for the course. Kind of tipped me off.
That's normal I guess. As we mentioned, it's much better if you have the theory background and then you just grab a book or Google things out in the field. That's par for the course.
If all you learned in school was the shit that you would now grab a book or Google, then you'll be in the exact same place without the theory background, and that's Bad.
Maybe you won't notice it directly, but you'll be using that theory all the time. You'll see what we mean when you work alongside someone who hasn't done the learning that you have. You're much better off for it.
I really don't doubt that at all. I was just disappointed at the disparage between BS CS and entry level job.
Though I would theoretically be better off had I not had a wife and 2 kids and working full time while going to school. Would have had lots of time to play around with Python and robots n shit.
But, it might be better to narrow down what exactly you are trying to learn; .Net covers two distinct desktop GUI libraries, COM automation interop, WCF, ASP, ADO, and about a dozen other technologies, and a whole load of languages, C# and VB.Net chief among them. A general .Net book isn't going to give you much more than a tour guide overview of all the different shit.
If you want a suggestion for increasing your marketability quickly, and you think you're in a Microsoft heavy area, I'd suggest two books: one on C# and one on ASP.NET.
Edit: Depending on what you've been doing in school, you could skip the C# book. It doesn't take much to figure it out if you already know some Java
My anecdotal feeling is that there are more jobs in web dev than desktop anymore, so that's what I'd look towards.
Realistically, though, your first job is going to be based on you convincing the employer that you're smart and self-motivated enough to pick things up as you go. The important part right now is doing something in a very current technology that you can talk about in an interview, to demonstrate that you're keeping your skills up to date.
Development isn't a 9-to-5 career -- it expects you to keep your skills sharp on your own time, so they want to know you're going to be ready to learn new technologies on your own time for the rest of your career. They don't want to hire one of the kids who thinks that what the prof told him is all the learning he ever needs to do, or the guy who thinks that employers owe him weeks of "retraining" when they want to move to a new technology or language
Summary: Scala is basically Java, if Java was invented in the year 2023 by a super-sentient race of aliens. Here are the things that make it cool.
Combines OOP and Functional Programming.
Functions are first class objects (closures and other goodness).
Statically typed with type inferencing.
Flexible syntax allows for highly expressive code.
As fast as Java.
Can use any Java library because it runs on the JVM.
Scala libraries can be used in other Java applications because it compiles to bytecode.
I could literally spend an hour listing more stuff, but if your interested, I suggest you click the link up above. I'm using it with JOGL to develop a game engine, but you could use it with any pre-made Java game engine if you are more interested in the game-making side and not the how-a-game-works side.
Language: Java
Framework: JEE, Spring, Hibernate, Struts
Purpose: Web Development
Summary: I do J2EE web development for my job. It's pretty awesome and I get to work on a variety of interesting problems. I work on all tiers of these systems from the UI down to the database and integration with legacy systems.
If you want massively scalable enterprise web applications then Java is one of the best decisions you could possibly make. The only thing that would make me love my job more is if we switched to Scala instead of Java.
That said, if you want to create a small-medium sized webapp, then Java and all of its enterprise-centric design decisions will probably be overkill. You're probably better off sticking with Python or Ruby or PHP (unless you just prefer static typing, or still need things to perform fast, or whatever reason makes Java more appealing to you).
Are you looking for a Common Lisp or any Lisp at all?
AFAIK, SBCL is the most popular free CL implementation, but apparently the Windows branch is experimental. Also heard good things about Clozure CL, particularly its Windows support.
And then there's Clojure, which is an incredibly neat modern Lisp that runs on the JVM, so it supports any platform that has Java. But on the other hand it's slightly different from other Lisps and not as user-friendly if you have no prior knowledge of the Java ecosystem.
Speaking of theory vs. the nuts & bolts of coding, are there any good, free resources that deal with the theory side of things? I'm aiming towards a web dev job, but would still like to have some decent theory to fall back on. I figure basic big-O, and learning various search algorithms and other data structures not given to me by default by C# would be a good place to start.
Don't some universities make their course lectures freely available online?
One of the major topics in theory (and the one that anyone interviewing with an eye to theory will expect you to have a firm grasp on) is sorting, and is a simple enough concept that you can pick up a lot of the methods without much background. They're also an excellent way to introduce yourself to computational complexity (Big-O). Key sorts are:
* Insertion sort (the most basic sort)
* Selection sort (a variation of insertion sort)
* Quick sort (the sort most commonly used by a lot of programming languages as the default)
* Merge sort (a nice recursive sort)
* Heap sort (use of the awesome data structure, the Heap)
* Radix sort (which is a slightly different paradigm for a sort that allows it to run in O(n) time in the right circumstances)
etc.
You'll definitely want to learn about binary searching as well. Techniques like dynamic programming are definitely worth learning too.
You'll also want to look up things like the Travelling Salesman problem and other NP-Hard problems. They give you a great idea about the sorts of problems that you either just shouldn't try to solve, or should try to find an approximation for instead.
Speaking of theory vs. the nuts & bolts of coding, are there any good, free resources that deal with the theory side of things? I'm aiming towards a web dev job, but would still like to have some decent theory to fall back on. I figure basic big-O, and learning various search algorithms and other data structures not given to me by default by C# would be a good place to start.
Don't some universities make their course lectures freely available online?
I know MIT puts their texts online, not sure about lectures. I'll dig through bookmarks later and update this.
One of the major topics in theory (and the one that anyone interviewing with an eye to theory will expect you to have a firm grasp on) is sorting, and is a simple enough concept that you can pick up a lot of the methods without much background. They're also an excellent way to introduce yourself to computational complexity (Big-O). Key sorts are:
* Insertion sort (the most basic sort)
* Selection sort (a variation of insertion sort)
* Quick sort (the sort most commonly used by a lot of programming languages as the default)
* Merge sort (a nice recursive sort)
* Heap sort (use of the awesome data structure, the Heap)
* Radix sort (which is a slightly different paradigm for a sort that allows it to run in O(n) time in the right circumstances)
etc.
You'll definitely want to learn about binary searching as well. Techniques like dynamic programming are definitely worth learning too.
You'll also want to look up things like the Travelling Salesman problem and other NP-Hard problems. They give you a great idea about the sorts of problems that you either just shouldn't try to solve, or should try to find an approximation for instead.
The other topic that goes hand in hand with sorting is data structures. While interviewing for jobs straight out of college, the one common question was something like: given <data access pattern> what would be the best data structure to use and why?
In school we had like 3 classes solely devoted to the theory of structures, sorting, and analysis of algorithms, and I feel like I am a much better programmer because of it. In your professional career, you probably won't ever need to implement any of these structures or algorithms, but knowing how and when to use them will go a long way.
* Array (super fast indexing but resizing takes time, not really a data structure so much as a data storage method)
* Linked List (super fast adding of new elements, but searching takes time, again, more of a data storage method)
* Hashtable (pretty much the greatest thing ever, more of a data storage method)
* Stack (when reading, you always get the latest element added)
* Queue (when reading, you always get the first element added that has not yet been read)
* Binary search tree (basically a tree where for any given node with a corresponding value, all the nodes in its left child are smaller, and all the nodes in its right child are larger)
Slightly less common:
* Heap (basically a tree that self-organizes as you add and remove elements so that the largest is always at the top)
Posts
Eh, I learned a lot of valuable, cross-technology core concepts in school that are never going to go out of date. I think the way Comp Sci is structured right now, heavy on theory and expect you to pick up an interesting looking language and technology and learn it on your own, is more or less ideal.
I didn't always to feel that way, but now that I've been in the industry for a few years I've had the "pleasure" of working with the alternative; guys who went to 2 or 4 year trade colleges and got a thorough training in .Net -- and zero theory.
These are the guys who ask me things like "Why'd you tell me to use a hashtable for this? I already have it in a list, and that whole [] operator thing is just like list.find()". Guys who I was determined to be senior to more or less immediately after I got hired out of school.
And then their eyes develop an idiot glaze while I try to explain why O(1) lookup vs O(n) would be a good idea on these 5 million records.
A lot of .NET books will focus on the framework, library reference books, and cookbooks, etc...
If you are a brand new programmer then most books will not initiate you well unless they explicitly say "for beginners".
You will certainly want a book with some healthy chapters explicitly on C# itself.
For example, I have
%.2f
For a float with 2 decimal spots.
But now I want a leading 0. Show me the way.
%02.2f didn't work (as %02d does for ints)
Chances are, unless you've got experience with audio recording, this will just end up with something that sounds worse and costs more than just buying high-quality samples.
yes it's ugly as sin, but here's how it works
#include "stdio.h" int main() { float num = 0.55f; printf("%05.2f \n", num); return 0; }so normally this prints (%f)
0.55000000
%.2f truncates to two decimal places (you already got that) and gives:
0.55
now, the padding number is not a number to specify how many spaces to add to a number, but specifies the total length of the print out (in characters) so doing %5.2f gives me 5 characters to work with, and puts a space on the left for any unused space, like so:
_0.55 (I had to use an underscore to show the space)
so now, adding a 0 will cause 0s to fill the space, so %05.2f gives
00.55
It looks like the main problem was that you assumed the first pad number was the number of pad spaces, when in fact it specifies the minimum number of characters that print takes up, if the string takes up more spaces than designated, no padding is added to the left.
Starting with smalltalk and using squeak IDE. It sure is a fun environment to play in. Not sure if I'll realistically use it for anything, but a couple of books I have read so far have recommended it to build some good habits.
"If you're going to play tiddly winks, play it with man hole covers."
- John McCallum
But for all its relative lack of use nowadays, it heavily influenced a number of later languages; Objective-C, Ruby, Python, etc.
I have this:
time -= 0.01;
Which runs on a loop. Time is declared as a double.
Then I try to do a comparison
if(time == 0.00)
But this seems to never fire. Ever.
I've tried, 0.00f, 0.000000 (which is how it prints in the console) as well... no dice.
Thoughts?
*edit* oops, time is a double.
This right here is why Comp Sci is important.
If you're not doing this, and your school is focusing on technologies and languages instead of theory and patterns, get out.
Assuming you're not allowing negative time, you can just convert it to:
if(time<=0.00f)
Floats/doubles can be a little fuzzy when you end up on a number that has no exact binary representation. You can add 0.01 and 0.03 and end up with 0.040000000001, for example. If you need to test for time being equal to zero, and you're allowing for negative time, you can convert to integer/long. So a countdown from 1 second to 0 by hundredths could simply count down from 100 to 0 by 1s, essentially reserving the single and tens digits as quasi-decimals.
I was lucky enough at my first job to work with real computer engineer and science grads who taught me the real stuff.
The thing about trade schools is that even the stuff they teach (language/platforms) is taught badly. 95% of what I know I learned on the job. Maybe 3 classes in my bachelors degree actually helped me at all.
avoid trade schools if you can help it.
Yeah, comparing floating point with == is tricky as is, here you don't even have a reason to guarantee that you'll be "close" to 0 let alone exactly.
As Netranger showed, you care more about crossing zero than equaling zero, right?
But I've just added a catch in the math to set it to 0 if less than 0.
And that will have to do.
No, the school sin't teaching technologies and languages and IS teaching the theory, but it never really crossed my mind that the leap from theory to job would be as great as it is. I had an interview a few weeks back for an entry level Programmer Analyst position, and they commented that I was taking some pretty heavy courses (AI, Compiler Theory, O/S) when thats just par for the course. Kind of tipped me off.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
That's normal I guess. As we mentioned, it's much better if you have the theory background and then you just grab a book or Google things out in the field. That's par for the course.
If all you learned in school was the shit that you would now grab a book or Google, then you'll be in the exact same place without the theory background, and that's Bad.
Maybe you won't notice it directly, but you'll be using that theory all the time. You'll see what we mean when you work alongside someone who hasn't done the learning that you have. You're much better off for it.
Though I would theoretically be better off had I not had a wife and 2 kids and working full time while going to school. Would have had lots of time to play around with Python and robots n shit.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
Understanding .NET 2ndEdition by Dave Chappell
or this one:
Programming .NET 3.5 by Jesse Liberty?
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
But, it might be better to narrow down what exactly you are trying to learn; .Net covers two distinct desktop GUI libraries, COM automation interop, WCF, ASP, ADO, and about a dozen other technologies, and a whole load of languages, C# and VB.Net chief among them. A general .Net book isn't going to give you much more than a tour guide overview of all the different shit.
If you want a suggestion for increasing your marketability quickly, and you think you're in a Microsoft heavy area, I'd suggest two books: one on C# and one on ASP.NET.
Edit: Depending on what you've been doing in school, you could skip the C# book. It doesn't take much to figure it out if you already know some Java
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
Realistically, though, your first job is going to be based on you convincing the employer that you're smart and self-motivated enough to pick things up as you go. The important part right now is doing something in a very current technology that you can talk about in an interview, to demonstrate that you're keeping your skills up to date.
Development isn't a 9-to-5 career -- it expects you to keep your skills sharp on your own time, so they want to know you're going to be ready to learn new technologies on your own time for the rest of your career. They don't want to hire one of the kids who thinks that what the prof told him is all the learning he ever needs to do, or the guy who thinks that employers owe him weeks of "retraining" when they want to move to a new technology or language
Aye, I'm holding myself to coding at least 2 hours a night. Second day in, and I'm still doing it!
Trying to decide if I should give myself the weekends off, or not. We'll see; this is only (my) Wednesday.
Framework: JOGL
Purpose: Game Development
Summary: Scala is basically Java, if Java was invented in the year 2023 by a super-sentient race of aliens. Here are the things that make it cool.
I could literally spend an hour listing more stuff, but if your interested, I suggest you click the link up above. I'm using it with JOGL to develop a game engine, but you could use it with any pre-made Java game engine if you are more interested in the game-making side and not the how-a-game-works side.
Language: Java
Framework: JEE, Spring, Hibernate, Struts
Purpose: Web Development
Summary: I do J2EE web development for my job. It's pretty awesome and I get to work on a variety of interesting problems. I work on all tiers of these systems from the UI down to the database and integration with legacy systems.
If you want massively scalable enterprise web applications then Java is one of the best decisions you could possibly make. The only thing that would make me love my job more is if we switched to Scala instead of Java.
That said, if you want to create a small-medium sized webapp, then Java and all of its enterprise-centric design decisions will probably be overkill. You're probably better off sticking with Python or Ruby or PHP (unless you just prefer static typing, or still need things to perform fast, or whatever reason makes Java more appealing to you).
The answer to this is yes.
AFAIK, SBCL is the most popular free CL implementation, but apparently the Windows branch is experimental. Also heard good things about Clozure CL, particularly its Windows support.
PLT Scheme is the most wide-used Scheme.
And then there's Clojure, which is an incredibly neat modern Lisp that runs on the JVM, so it supports any platform that has Java. But on the other hand it's slightly different from other Lisps and not as user-friendly if you have no prior knowledge of the Java ecosystem.
Don't some universities make their course lectures freely available online?
I would recommend checking out Microsoft's publications. I believe they have a magazine strictly dedicated to .NET
Or straight from the uni sites: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Theory of Computation, etc.
:eyeroll:
I'm looking for something more general, and not tied to any particular language or platform.
This is perfect. Thanks.
edit: turns out there's a third edition: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Third-Thomas-Cormen/dp/0262033844/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Explained-Perspective-Object-Oriented/dp/0321247140/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262563765&sr=8-3
are the standard literature I know of on general code design.
* Insertion sort (the most basic sort)
* Selection sort (a variation of insertion sort)
* Quick sort (the sort most commonly used by a lot of programming languages as the default)
* Merge sort (a nice recursive sort)
* Heap sort (use of the awesome data structure, the Heap)
* Radix sort (which is a slightly different paradigm for a sort that allows it to run in O(n) time in the right circumstances)
etc.
You'll definitely want to learn about binary searching as well. Techniques like dynamic programming are definitely worth learning too.
You'll also want to look up things like the Travelling Salesman problem and other NP-Hard problems. They give you a great idea about the sorts of problems that you either just shouldn't try to solve, or should try to find an approximation for instead.
I know MIT puts their texts online, not sure about lectures. I'll dig through bookmarks later and update this.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
The other topic that goes hand in hand with sorting is data structures. While interviewing for jobs straight out of college, the one common question was something like: given <data access pattern> what would be the best data structure to use and why?
In school we had like 3 classes solely devoted to the theory of structures, sorting, and analysis of algorithms, and I feel like I am a much better programmer because of it. In your professional career, you probably won't ever need to implement any of these structures or algorithms, but knowing how and when to use them will go a long way.
* Array (super fast indexing but resizing takes time, not really a data structure so much as a data storage method)
* Linked List (super fast adding of new elements, but searching takes time, again, more of a data storage method)
* Hashtable (pretty much the greatest thing ever, more of a data storage method)
* Stack (when reading, you always get the latest element added)
* Queue (when reading, you always get the first element added that has not yet been read)
* Binary search tree (basically a tree where for any given node with a corresponding value, all the nodes in its left child are smaller, and all the nodes in its right child are larger)
Slightly less common:
* Heap (basically a tree that self-organizes as you add and remove elements so that the largest is always at the top)
I ask because this will be my text next semester.
Also, you never know when the answer to a question might be bubble sort. Never hurts to know the absolute worst sort you could choose.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010