Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition

Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition is an illustrated, approachable introduction to the algorithms every programmer most needs to know. It uses plain explanations, more than 400 illustrations and dozens of practical examples, and it requires no advanced math or programming skills. The aim is to make the algorithms you use most often easy to learn, understand and apply, and to prepare you for questions about them in a coding interview.

The book starts with basic tasks such as sorting and searching, then builds toward harder problems including data compression and artificial intelligence. Along the way it covers search, sort and graph algorithms, data structures such as arrays, lists, hash tables, trees and graphs, and NP-complete and greedy algorithms. It also shows how to compare the performance trade-offs between different algorithms. Every chapter includes exercises and code samples, and the annotated code has been updated to Python 3.

The first edition reached more than 100,000 readers. This revision adds new coverage of trees, including binary search trees, balanced trees and B-trees, along with fresh insights on data structure performance that take modern CPUs into account. Daniel Zingaro wrote the foreword.

The chapters run in this order: introduction to algorithms, selection sort, recursion, quicksort, hash tables, breadth-first search, trees, balanced trees, Dijkstra's algorithm, greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, k-nearest neighbors, and where to go next. The author, Aditya Bhargava, is a software engineer with a dual background in Computer Science and Fine Arts.