Java Algorithms

In this book, written at the time of JDK 1.1.1, the author attempts to convey to the reader that the Java programming language is not just for creating applets, but can be used for networking, interprocess communications, scientific programming, and for creating portable graphic interfaces. It is reasonably well-written, but the author should have spent more time on the performance issues in writing stand-alone code in Java. He makes the claim that a Java program can outperform an equivalent program in C++, but he offers no benchmark comparisons to substantiate his claim. This is particularly for his discussion of matrix algebra in Java. His general discussion of algorithms to do various tasks is pretty well-written, and a reader could gain insight into the workings of these algorithms by the perusal of this book.The author also gives hints on how to improve the performance of Java programs. In the discussion of sorting for example, he explains how to remove recursion in order to implement an iterative scheme for sorting, thus enhancing performance. He is also careful to point out that the presence of primitive types in Java, which cannot be derived from the Object class. Thus it is often required, as the author explains, to create methods to convert arrays of primitive types to arrays of wrapper classes.The author's discussion of numerical applications in Java is fairly well-written, as he discusses the various numeric data types in Java, and how it does conversions between numeric types. And he points out some of the virtues that Java has in manipulating arrays, one example being that manual range checking need not be done. He does give Java code for the Fast Fourier Transform, but it is too slow to be of practical interest in serious real-world applications.A reader with background in computational biology and genome sequence analysis might find the author's discussion on Java strings of interest. Java has been used in biological applications, but the software language PERL continues to be dominant in these applications. The author develops explicitly algorithms for string searching in chapter 3, and these could be adapted to biological applications if one is so inclined.Another topic of interest in the book is the one on high-performance containers. The author recognizes that Java does not provide for the standard data structures like queues and linked lists, so he spends a fair amount of time developing various types of containers.The author also introduces evolutionary programming and its implementation in Java. This is done via the construction of finite state machines, and the evolutionary algorithm calculates a fitness value for each finite state machine based on its performance. A fun example dealing with robot examples is provided in Java. In addition, a very interesting discussion (with Java source code) is given for random number generation.The discussions on serialization and serialization in random access files might be useful to the reader who is attempting to write network and database applications in Java or writing JavaBeans applications. There is also an entire chapter devoted to implementing (in Java) the BTree data structure. I was not aware of this data structure before reading the book, so this chapter was interesting reading.By far the most pleasureful part of the book was the discussion on stellar cartography and star map plotting, from both a personal and educational standpoint. Instructors of astronomy or earth science could easily use the Java implementation in the classroom to illustrate the relevant concepts to students.

I found this a good book, with practical algorithms, but a bit sloppy, there are a lot of errors, as well in the code (rare) as in the text (often). The explanations aren't allways clear, but with a bit searching one gets the results...

Well written, concise, and packed with useful algorithms. Any professional developer will want this title within arm's reach.

If you need to write a algorithm in java or are looking for some well written and useful algorithms. This is the book for you