Programming For The Puzzled

Learning programming with one of “the coolest applications around”: algorithmic puzzles ranging from scheduling selfie time to verifying the six degrees of separation hypothesis. This book builds a bridge between the recreational world of algorithmic puzzles (puzzles that can be solved by algorithms) and the pragmatic world of computer programming, teaching readers to program while solving puzzles. Few introductory students want to program for programming's sake. Puzzles are real-world applications that are attention grabbing, intriguing, and easy to describe. Each lesson starts with the description of a puzzle. After a failed attempt or two at solving the puzzle, the reader arrives at an Aha! moment—a search strategy, data structure, or mathematical fact—and the solution presents itself. The solution to the puzzle becomes the specification of the code to be written. Readers will thus know what the code is supposed to do before seeing the code itself. This represents a pedagogical philosophy that decouples understanding the functionality of the code from understanding programming language syntax and semantics. Python syntax and semantics required to understand the code are explained as needed for each puzzle. Readers need only the rudimentary grasp of programming concepts that can be obtained from introductory or AP computer science classes in high school. The book includes more than twenty puzzles and more than seventy programming exercises that vary in difficulty. Many of the puzzles are well known and have appeared in publications and on websites in many variations. They range from scheduling selfie time with celebrities to solving Sudoku problems in seconds to verifying the six degrees of separation hypothesis. The code for selected puzzle solutions is downloadable from the book's website; the code for all puzzle solutions is available to instructors.

Aimed at both working programmers who are applying for a job where puzzles are an integral part of the interview, as well as techies who just love a good puzzle, this book offers a cache of exciting puzzles Features a new series of puzzles, never before published, called elimination puzzles that have a pedagogical aim of helping the reader solve an entire class of Sudoku-like puzzles Provides the tools to solve the puzzles by hand and computer The first part of each chapter presents a puzzle; the second part shows readers how to solve several classes of puzzles algorithmically; the third part asks the reader to solve a mystery involving codes, puzzles, and geography Comes with a unique bonus: if readers actually solve the mystery, they have a chance to win a prize, which will be promoted on wrox.com!

Algorithmic puzzles are puzzles involving well-defined procedures for solving problems. This book will provide an enjoyable and accessible introduction to algorithmic puzzles that will develop the reader's algorithmic thinking. The first part of this book is a tutorial on algorithm design strategies and analysis techniques. Algorithm design strategies — exhaustive search, backtracking, divide-and-conquer and a few others — are general approaches to designing step-by-step instructions for solving problems. Analysis techniques are methods for investigating such procedures to answer questions about the ultimate result of the procedure or how many steps are executed before the procedure stops. The discussion is an elementary level, with puzzle examples, and requires neither programming nor mathematics beyond a secondary school level. Thus, the tutorial provides a gentle and entertaining introduction to main ideas in high-level algorithmic problem solving. The second and main part of the book contains 150 puzzles, from centuries-old classics to newcomers often asked during job interviews at computing, engineering, and financial companies. The puzzles are divided into three groups by their difficulty levels. The first fifty puzzles in the Easier Puzzles section require only middle school mathematics. The sixty puzzle of average difficulty and forty harder puzzles require just high school mathematics plus a few topics such as binary numbers and simple recurrences, which are reviewed in the tutorial. All the puzzles are provided with hints, detailed solutions, and brief comments. The comments deal with the puzzle origins and design or analysis techniques used in the solution. The book should be of interest to puzzle lovers, students and teachers of algorithm courses, and persons expecting to be given puzzles during job interviews.

Learning Algorithms Through Programming and Puzzle Solving is one of the first textbooks to emerge from the recent Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) revolution and a com- panion to the authors' online specialization on Coursera and MicroMasters Program on edX. The book introduces a programming-centric approach to learning algorithms and strikes a unique balance between algorithmic ideas, programming challenges, and puz- zle solving. Since the launch of this project on Coursera and edX, hundreds of thousands students tried to solve programming challenges and algorithmic puzzles covered in this book.The book is also a step towards developing an Intelligent Tutoring System for learning algo- rithms. In a classroom, once a student takes a wrong turn, there are limited opportunities to ask a question, resulting in a learning breakdown, or the inability to progress further without individual guidance. When a student suffers a learning breakdown, that student needs immediate help in order to proceed. Traditional textbooks do not provide such help, but the automated grading system described in this MOOC book does!The book is accompanied by additional educational materials that include the book website, video lectures, slides, FAQs, and other resources available at Coursera and EdX.

If you are preparing the programming interview for a software engineer position, you might want to look at this book. Make sure you have basic knowledge of data structure and algorithm, because this book is mostly focus on how to resolve the coding puzzles with existing data structure and algorithm. If you need some refresh of data structure and algorithm, there is a good book you might want to take a look first, by Thomas H. Cormen. What the 2nd edition brings to you: 1.136 problems in Recursion, Divid and Conquer, Binary Search, Tree Traversal, Graph Traversal, Dynamic Programming, String Search etc, which is more than enough for preparing a software engineer interview. Every puzzle contains a detailed explanation and some implementations. 2.An Appendix in the end of this book for designing question preparation. This appendix includes some selected papers, books I had read in the past two years. And I think this is the most important change in the second edition. Learning what current industry does and keeping improving the design skill will help yourself in a long-term career. Again, this book is used to present how to analysis a problem and link the inside the challenge with some existing algrithoms. The goal of this book is to improve the problem solving ability, not to be a collection of latest interview questions from Facebook, Google etc. Hope this book can help you get your desired offer.

Helps readers gain a more thorough understanding of C syntax and semantics through puzzles that challenge readers' proficiency with basics. Puzzles are based on ANSI Standard C, and in many cases programs are print statements, so the puzzle solution is the resulting printout. Includes step-by-step solutions. For C programming students at the intermediate level. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The previous version was a great collection of funny puzzles and it proved its value. Since the previous book is already quite thick, instead of keeping adding more puzzles into it, I decide to write a new edition with all the new puzzles inside. If you are preparing the programming interview for a software engineer position, you might want to look at this book. Make sure you have basic knowledge of data structure and algorithm, because this book is mostly focus on how to resolve the coding puzzles with existing data structure and algorithm. If you need some refresh of data structure and algorithm, there is a good book you might want to take a look first, by Thomas H. Cormen. In this new version, there are 53 new puzzles. Again and again, this book is used to present how to analysis a problem and solve the challenge with some existing algrithoms. Improving your ability of solveing the problem is much more important than writing the code..