Mastering Algorithms with Perl: Practical Programming Through Computer Science

Front Cover
"O'Reilly Media, Inc.", Aug 18, 1999 - Computers - 706 pages

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
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Basic Data Structures
25
Advanced Data Structures
47
Sorting
107
Searching
165
Sets
213
Matrices
255
Graphs
285
Number Theory
521
Cryptography
549
Probability
589
Statistics
623
Numerical Analysis
651
Further Reading
675
ASCII Character Set
679
Index
685

Strings
369
Geometric Algorithms
443
Number Systems
489
About the Authors
710
Copyright

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