Mastering Algorithms with Perl

by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi, John Macdonald

Many programmers would love to use Perl for projects that involve heavy lifting, but miss the many traditional algorithms that textbooks teach for other languages. Computer scientists have identified many techniques that a wide range of programs need, such as: Fuzzy pattern matching for text (identify misspellings!) Finding correlations in data Game-playing algorithms Predicting phenomena such as Web traffic Polynomial and spline fitting

Using algorithms explained in this book, you too can carry out traditional programming tasks in a high-powered, efficient, easy-to-maintain manner with Perl.

This book assumes a basic understanding of Perl syntax and functions, but not necessarily any background in computer science. The authors explain in a readable fashion the reasons for using various classic programming techniques, the kind of applications that use them, and -- most important -- how to code these algorithms in Perl.

If you are an amateur programmer, this book will fill you in on the essential algorithms you need to solve problems like an expert. If you have already learned algorithms in other languages, you will be surprised at how much different (and often easier) it is to implement them in Perl. And yes, the book even has the obligatory fractal display program.

There have been dozens of books on programming algorithms, some of them excellent, but never before has there been one that uses Perl.

The authors include the editor of "The Perl Journal" and master librarian of CPAN; all are contributors to CPAN and have archived much of the code in this book there.

"This book was so exciting I lost sleep reading it." Tom Christiansen

Genres: Programming, Computers, Technology, Nonfiction, Technical, Reference, Computer Science

706 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Bokieie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was exactly what I expected it to be.

[Mark A.]

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[Avi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a great idea for a book, poorly executed. It whipsaws violently from the banal to the obtuse, and tries to cover far more ground than it has room to manage. I think the authors would have been well-served to eliminate the last third of the book and expand the remainder to fill that space.

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent algorithms text. I found the idea of using Perl for all the examples very interesting. I had hoped that would make some of the more confusing psudocode found in CLR and others more readable. In some cases it worked quite well. However there is a lot of terrible Perl in this book. The version of quicksort takes a reasonably simple algorithm and renders it impossible to understand. The sad thing is that the language wasn't the cause of that problem.

Altogether it's a good supplement to some of the classic algorithm texts. On its own I think it would be confusing and a poor reference.