I trained as a chartered public finance accountant because I have a mathematics degree and I wanted to work in public service. After 20 years of that I became a freelance consultant and got into teaching public financial management after volunteering for a project in South Sudan. I have taught here in the UK and in other countries, including Kazakhstan, South Sudan, Uganda, and Sri Lanka. The lack of a good textbook about managing public money that was not aimed at accountants led me to write one in 2010. The third edition of it will be published in 2023. (I am still waiting for my novel to find a publisher.)
Billy Bragg has long been my favourite musician. I have all his albums including his 1986 offering, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry.
I included this book because it is about the importance of accountability. This is an important concept for managing public money. The wish for our governments to operate in an honest and fair way requires there being a way to judge their performance. This means that the politicians, civil servants, and everyone else who is involved in government must be willing to be accountable for what they do, and also for what they omit to do. When I teach public financial management I say to my students that if they do not want to be accountable for their actions they should not work in public service.
At a time when opinion trumps facts and truth is treated as nothing more than another perspective, free speech has become a battleground. While authoritarians and algorithms threaten democracy, we argue over who has the right to speak.
To protect ourselves from encroaching tyranny, we must look beyond this one-dimensional notion of what it means to be free and, by reconnecting liberty to equality and accountability, restore the individual agency engendered by the three dimensions of freedom.
I love pulling back the curtain on how computers work. I want to go from thinking "that's magic" to "that's unbelievably clever but now I understand how it works." Each time I am able to do this feels like a hard-won but therefore meaningful step toward understanding. I want others to experience this empowering shift. I have a PhD in computer science education, and I want to know what helps people learn. More importantly, I want to know how we can use such discoveries to write more effective books. The books I appreciate most are those that demonstrate not only mastery of the subject matter but also mastery of teaching.
This is the book that started it all for me… and I think it holds up just fine today. I see value in confronting the old Pascal code every so often: it’s a reminder of how little we need in order to make our algorithms fast, and how much is happening behind the scenes by our modern programming languages. To this day this book has some of my favourite presentations of Dijkstra’s Algorithm and sorting.
The authors' treatment of data structures in Data Structures and Algorithms is unified by an informal notion of "abstract data types," allowing readers to compare different implementations of the same concept. Algorithm design techniques are also stressed and basic algorithm analysis is covered. Most of the programs are written in Pascal.
I've had a long-time interest in two things: mathematics and social issues. This is why I got degrees in social work (Masters) and sociology (PhD) and eventually focused on the quantitative aspects of these two areas. Social Workers Count gave me the chance to marry these two interests by showing the role mathematics can play in illuminating a number of pressing social issues.
As I write these lines, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention.
This is largely due to ChatGpt recently bursting onto the scene. But even before ChatGpt began making its mark, AI was often in the news. Some have expressed worry that it will take our jobs, others that it will reinforce systemic oppression by making racially or otherwise discriminatory decisions, and some have even voiced concerns that one day a superintelligent AI might pose an existential threat to humanity.
In the midst of all this, what might get lost is what AI is, what it's capable of doing, and what its limitations are. Wenger's book is intended to address all of these questions. It manages to do so in a way which goes into some of the mathematics of AI systems and yet remain accessible to a lay audience.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere―it’s in our houses and phones and cars. AI makes decisions about what we should buy, watch, and read, and it won’t be long before AI’s in our hospitals, combing through our records. Maybe soon it will even be deciding who’s innocent, and who goes to jail . . . But most of us don’t understand how AI works. We hardly know what it is. In "Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us?", AI expert Kenneth Wenger deftly explains the complexity at AI’s heart, demonstrating its potential and exposing its shortfalls. Wenger empowers readers to answer the question―What…
As an author, I run my own business and have a hand in all aspects of my product, from creation to promotion. My work is my passion, so I love to write (and read!) books about women who have that same dedication to their careers. I enjoy seeing these ladies strive for success and how they handle challenges along the way. And, of course, since RomComs are my genre, those challenges often involve a man because where else is a workaholic going to find her soulmate? The witty banter, sizzling sexual tension, snort-laugh moments, and surprising plot twists on the pages of all these books, including mine, are guaranteed to entertain you.
An office rivalry between software developer Emma and app developer Rishi takes an interesting turn when they’re sent to Bangalore to work on a project together.
Back in his home country, Rishi’s family pressures him to get married to a woman of the right caste/religion. Emma offers to create an algorithm to help Rishi find the perfect wife who might be a lot closer than he thinks!
This book does a wonderful job of delving into the challenges of an American woman dating an Indian man as well as the dynamics and relationships within an Indian family. Brooke Burroughs brings India to vibrant life on the page, and I felt as though I was falling in love with the country (and Rishi!) along with Emma.
In Brooke Burroughs's endearing debut novel set in vibrant India, enemies turned allies encounter obstacles in an unexpected multicultural romance only to discover that in the end, love is love.
Emma has always lived her life according to a plan. But after turning down her boyfriend's proposal, everything starts to crumble. In an effort to save the one thing she cares about-her job-she must recruit her colleague, Rishi, to be on her development team...only she may or may not have received the position he was promised. (She did.)
Rishi cannot believe that he got passed over for promotion. To make…
I love pulling back the curtain on how computers work. I want to go from thinking "that's magic" to "that's unbelievably clever but now I understand how it works." Each time I am able to do this feels like a hard-won but therefore meaningful step toward understanding. I want others to experience this empowering shift. I have a PhD in computer science education, and I want to know what helps people learn. More importantly, I want to know how we can use such discoveries to write more effective books. The books I appreciate most are those that demonstrate not only mastery of the subject matter but also mastery of teaching.
For an overview book that focuses on intuition—a book that is intentionally designed to evade formality—to make my list, it has to be really, really good. This one is. I appreciate the inclusion of real code in multiple programming languages and the step-by-step traces of algorithms. I appreciate the care taken with the Big O material and the way that abstract data types are introduced. This is one of very few books whose recursion material I like—the ‘napkin’ approach to recursion is wonderfully done.
If you thought that data structures and algorithms were all just theory, you're missing out on what they can do for your code. Learn to use Big O Notation to make your code run faster by orders of magnitude. Choose from data structures such as hash tables, trees, and graphs to increase your code's efficiency exponentially. With simple language and clear diagrams, this book makes this complex topic accessible, no matter your background. This new edition features practice exercises in every chapter, and new chapters on topics such as dynamic programming and heaps and tries. Get the hands-on info you…
I have been a machine learning engineer applying my ML expertise in computational advertising, and search domain. I am an author of 8 machine learning books. My first book was ranked the #1 bestseller in its category on Amazon in 2017 and 2018 and was translated into many languages. I am also a ML education enthusiast and used to teach ML courses in Toronto, Canada.
This was my favorite book when I started my career. It talks about how information is processed, in an intelligent way, in the internet age. It acts as a tutorial to teach developers how to code our own ML programs, from online dating services, to document analyzer, and search engine. The author did an excellent job of explaining abstract ML algorithms with clear examples. His coding style in Python reads clearly, which makes the book more beginner-friendly.
Don’t get disappointed when you know this book is more than a decade old. It was a visionary book back in the day and it is still relevant today.
Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing,…
I have been working with computers for decades now – having started with programmable handheld calculators and working my way up and down through mainframes, mini- and micro-computers. I always thought there is an art to writing software, and that good software can be read and admired. Maintainability, readability, and testability are some core needs for software, and after going through many programming paradigms, I feel that functional programming (FP) is the way to go – and several modern web frameworks agree. JavaScript (and now, TypeScript) are essential to web development, and I wanted to show how FP could be successfully used with those languages, and thus my book.
This book is essential in that it follows a systematic and scientific approach to software development, advocating for clarity in expressing algorithms, providing a rigorous framework for designing and reasoning about programs, and, fundamentally, always focusing on formal methods and mathematical techniques to ensure correctness and efficiency in programming code.
Most importantly, the book doesn’t just show you how to prove programs correct, but also teaches how to arrive from a definition to an efficient and correct solution, so I would recommend this to every developer.
I am a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University learning/teaching/researching mathematics/algorithms/puzzles. In these fields, I have published a book, published 15+ papers in conferences/journals, been granted a US patent, won two Outstanding Paper Awards, taught 10+ courses in 25+ offerings, and have supervised 90+ master's/bachelor students. I am a puzzle addict involved in this field for 25 years and puzzles are my religion/God. Puzzles are the main form of supreme energy in this universe that can consistently give me infinite peace.
This is one of the first books in the entire puzzles literature that gave multiple detailed solutions to several beautiful mathematical puzzles.
Some of today's most famous puzzles were either popularized or introduced in this book. For example, truck in the desert, start of the snow, the rookie electrician, hole in a sphere, captivating problem in navigation, the hunter and his dog, the counterfeit coin, and common birthdays.
This book with its multiple-solutions feature taught me that we should never stop searching for more solutions as there can always be a better solution. Furthermore, when 1- or 2-paragraph solutions were the norm, this book illustrated the beauty of having multi-page detailed solutions.
Interestingly, this book is a crowd-written book as most of the puzzles and solutions presented in this book are contributed by readers of a magazine. This implies that it is possible to write great crowd-written books.
For two decades, an international readership of workers in applied mathematics submitted their favorite puzzles to a mid-twentieth-century column, The Graham Dial. This original collection features 100 of the publication's very best problems, with themes ranging from logic and engineering situations to number theory and geometry. Each problem was specifically selected for its widely differing modes of solution, and most include several methods of solution plus assessments of their efficacy. In checking their solutions against the book's, readers may find that their interest in the puzzles increases. The search for an answer can develop into a challenge to improve upon…
I started programming in high school and wrote software in many domains for 30 years, from the early ARPA-net to massive credit card software. I wrote a FORTRAN compiler with one assistant in a year. I got hassled to do proper project management. Nightmare. It was all about inflated expectations instead of moving fast and winning. Then in 25 years of venture capital investing, I learned from many young companies how the little startups built quickly and well things that giants like Google literally could not get done. This book and my others spell out what I learned from the little guys who beat the giants.
This is the definitive book series on algorithms and the core of computer programming.
Unlike most such books, Knuth is a real programmer, deep into the details of the craft, to the point of creating his own assembler language and typesetting generation system. It’s partly the substance of the algorithms and their analysis, but even more is the way he models a way of thinking about and solving complexity that makes this a must-read series.
Finally, after a wait of more than thirty-five years, the first part of Volume 4 is at last ready for publication. Check out the boxed set that brings together Volumes 1 - 4A in one elegant case, and offers the purchaser a $50 discount off the price of buying the four volumes individually.
The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-4A Boxed Set, 3/e
Knuth is perhaps the true founder of
Computer Science, who set out in the late 1960s to produce a seven-volume
series of books containing all the foundations of the discipline.
Three volumes appeared by 1973, after which he
got distracted by many other things, and the promised volumes seemed destined never to emerge. But Knuth finished Volume 4A in
2011, after a lapse of 35 years. And then, in the Fall of 2022, at the age of 84, he
published the 712-page Volume 4B: Combinatorial Algorithms Part II!
There is nothing in the world like
a Knuth book. He has a unique way of looking at the world and an unrivaled sense
of detail and humor. He goes deeper down
rabbit holes than any man alive, and you come out smarter and with a sense of
wonder that such books really exist.
Volume 4B is dedicated to
combinatorial search algorithms,…
The Art of Computer Programming is Knuth's multivolume analysis of algorithms. With the addition of this new volume, it continues to be the definitive description of classical computer science.
Volume 4B, the sequel to Volume 4A, extends Knuth's exploration of combinatorial algorithms. These algorithms are of keen interest to software designers because ". . . a single good idea can save years or even centuries of computer time."
The book begins with coverage of Backtrack Programming, together with a set of data structures whose links perform "delightful dances" and are ideally suited to this domain. New techniques for important applications…
