DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS

This book is a condensed version of the subjects that we, as professors, have regularly discussed over the past 10years in a variety of undergraduate courses at Thiruvalluvar university pertaining to Design and Analysis of Algorithms. The primary audience consisted of post-graduate students  of computer science and computer applications as well as junior level (3rd year) computer  Applications and computer science students. This book can also be used as the basis for a more advanced algorithm course where the reader is introduced to newer more modern computational frameworks that are more appropriate and widely used.

Both the science and the practise of computers are centred around algorithms. Since this truth has been acknowledged, numerous textbooks on the topic have come to be. Generally speaking, they present algorithms in one of two ways. Algorithms are categorised based on the kind of problem they solve. Separate chapters on sorting, searching, graphs, and other algorithms would be included in  a book. This method’s advantage is that it enables a quick comparison of instance, the effectiveness of various algorithms for the same task.

Most applications of the design techniques in the book are to classic problems of computer science. (The only innovation here is an inclusion of some material on numerical algorithms, which are covered within the same general framework.) But these design techniques can be considered general problem solving tools, whose applications are not limited to traditional computing and mathematical problems. Two factors make this point particularly important. First, more and more computing applications go beyond the traditional domain, and there are reasons to believe that this trend will strengthen in the future. Second, developing students’ problem solving skills has come to be recognized as a major goal of college education. Among all the courses in a computer Applications and Computer science curriculum, a course on the design and analysis of algorithms is uniquely suitable for this task because it can offer a student specific strategies for solving problems.