Recommend an algorithms exercise book?

Question

I have a little book called Problems on Algorithms by Ian Parberry which is chock full of exercises related to the study of algorithms. Can anybody recommend similar books?

What I am not looking for are recommendations of good books related to algorithms or the theory of computation. Introduction to Algorithms is a good one, and of course there's the Knuth stuff.

Ideally I want to know of any books that are light on instructional material and heavy on sample problems. In a nutshell, exercise books. Preferably dedicated to algorithms rather than general logic or other math problems.

By the way, the Parberry book does not seem to be in print, but it is available as a PDF dowload.

Answer 1

The Algorithm Design Manual
by Steven S. Skiena

Edit: for Steve Yegge's fans, Get that job at Google.

[...] 1) Study a data-structures and algorithms book. [...]
My absolute favorite for this kind of interview preparation is Steven Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual. More than any other book it helped me understand just how astonishingly commonplace (and important) graph problems are – they should be part of every working programmer's toolkit. The book also covers basic data structures and sorting algorithms, which is a nice bonus. But the gold mine is the second half of the book, which is a sort of encyclopedia of 1-pagers on zillions of useful problems and various ways to solve them, without too much detail. Almost every 1-pager has a simple picture, making it easy to remember. This is a great way to learn how to identify hundreds of problem types. [...]

Answer 2

When I was in college the professor would assign problems out of PascAlgorithms. I have no idea if the actual book is good or not, but the problems that came out of there were always fascinating.

Answer 3

Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by Michael T. Goodrich and Roberto Tamassia is primarily a text book, but it has excellent exercises as well.

I do only know the Java version, but it seems they have written Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ as well.

Answer 4

• Programming Pearls
• Data Structures and Algorithms in Java (2nd Ed)

Answer 5

I recently posted a list of programming puzzle sites on my blog. All of them have lots of sample problems, and TopCoder has a good section of Algorithm Tutorials posted by top users.

For sample problems I highly recommend the following:

• Project Euler
• UVa Online Judge
• Sphere Online Judge

Answer 6

While not strictly exercise books, they could be adapted fairly easily:

Mastering Algorithms in C

Mastering Algorithms in Perl

Do not look past books on numerical methods - especially if you are interested in more mathematical kinds of algorithms. The Numerical Recipes books, for all their warts, are still the "standard" among most scientists and engineers. Be warned...this book is only interesting for the description of the algorithm NOT for the code. The code in this book was written under the theory that "...Fortran can be written in any language...", and it's bad Fortran at that.

Numerical Recipes: The Art Of Scientific Computing

Answer 7

Another favorite book,

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
by Toby Segaran

Its focus is on data mining algorithms, and it has a collection (and implementation) of many interesting algorithms.

Although the code samples are in Python, you wont have trouble understanding them - they look like pseudo-code.

Answer 8

For an independent review of Algorithms in a nutshell I'd also say that any book by jon bently is worth reading.