The purpose of this book is to provide a practical compendium of algorithms for use in applications. Unlike most works on algorithms, this book is not a  textbook: you will not find implementation details left as an exercise for the reader, nor will you find highly theoretical discussions of algorithms with small  snippets of code to show how the implementation might be undertaken. Rather, in keeping with our belief that the best explanation is a functioning program, you will find a wide selection of algorithms fully implemented in C with substantial practical discussion of their best use in a variety of applications. Theoretical material is presented only to enable programmers to change the implementation to suit specific needs or to more wisely select an algorithm for a particular use. When it arises in these contexts, the theory is presented in an approachable manner. References to more abstract material are provided at the end of each chapter.

Most algorithm books today are either academic textbooks or rehashes of the same tired set of algorithms. Practical Algorithms for Programmers is the first book to give complete code implementations of all algorithms useful to developers in their daily work. This book focuses on practical, immediately usable code with extensive discussion of portability and implementation-specific details. The authors present the useful but rarely discussed algorithms for phonetic searches, date and time routines (to the year AD 1), B-trees and indexed files, data compression, arbitrary precision arithmetic, checksums and data validation, as well as the most comprehensive coverage available of search routines, sort algorithms, and data structures. Practical Algorithms for Programmers requires only a working knowledge of C and no math beyond basic algebra. The source code is ANSI-compliant and has been tested and run on compilers from Borland, Microsoft, Watcom, and UNIX. 020163208XB04062001