0 Front Matter
0.1 Foreword
0.2 Preface
Welcome to Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures
It’s great to have you on board for this journey into the world of data structures and algorithms.
I hope this will be as an exciting journey for you as it was for us.
The topics discussed in this book have contributed to advance software engineering and changed the world around us. They still do make a difference and likely, on average, you get in contact with dozens of devices and services using these algorithms, every day.
The study of algorithms far predates the dawn of computer science: think about Eurler algorithm and the whole field of graph theory, which are three centuries old, but that’s nothing compared to the two millennia since the sieve of Eratosthenes (used to make tables of prime numbers) was first conceived.
And yet, for a long time in the computer era, algorithms mostly were relegated to academia, with a few notable exceptions like the Bell labs, where between the 50s and the 90s their R&D teams produced great advancement in the field like (to name a few) dynamic programming, the Bellman-Ford algorithm, and convolutional neural networks for image recognition.