computer-science

I am searching for an online resource referring to data structures and algorithms. Basicaly what I am interested in, is a kind of comprehensive list of things such as: when a data structure or algorithm is used, pros and cons compared to each other, real life-problem usage, etc. I have a couple of popular books on the subject, like "introduction to algorithms" and "algorithm design manual", and have found code implementations of various data structures and algorithms online. But what I can't find is a web page listing them all together. So I am looking for a reference online page, where I can

What I would like to know is to start programming from scratch without any Operating System and anything like it. As I know Windows and Mac and almost anything even the DOS is written in C, C++ Pascal etc., so I think I should know one of these languages, but for this I would need a program where I can write the code, and also to compile it but without an Operating System and programs how can be this done? How could they do it? But this is not enough far, how was C written? in what? So when I mean scratch I mean, building everything from the basics. Maybe from 0,1,0,1 right now I think this is

By "theoretical computer science topics", I am referring to things such as regular vs non-regular languages, the pumping lemma, and grammars. I'm familiar with the real world applications of finite automata and regular expressions, but topics such as these other ones are giving me more problems as I'm not seeing any real world applications. These things are useful if you want to know whether trying to do something is futile with regular expressions. For example, knowing that XML is non-regular is useful if the idea to parse XML with regex ever enters your mind. And if you don't know off the

I'm reviewing some old notes from my algorithms course and the dynamic programming problems are seeming a bit tricky to me. I have a problem where we have an unlimited supply of coins, with some denominations x1, x2, ... xn and we want to make change for some value X. We are trying to design a dynamic program to decide whether change for X can be made or not (not minimizing the number of coins, or returning which coins, just true or false). I've done some thinking about this problem, and I can see a recursive method of doing this where it's something like... MakeChange(X, x[1..n this is the

I have done some searching but have not found a truly satisfactory answer. As a developer i want to invest the necessary time in understanding this, thus i am looking for a complete explanation on this and feel free to provide any useful references. Thanks. nelaaro I would recommend buying this book by Andrew S. Tanenbaum . He developed one of the predecessors to Linux called Minix. I used Structured Computer Organization as part of my university course. Why computers use binary is not just a matter of switch context. Relative to a reference voltage of say 3v. +1v(4v) = true or 1 and -1v(2v) =

I'm a totally blind individual who would like to learn more of the theory aspect of computer science. I've had an intro data structures class and the general intro programming but would like to learn more on things such as software design, advanced data structures, and compiler design. I want to do this as a self study course not as part of college classes. Unfortunately there aren’t many text books available on computer science from Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic where I normally get my textbooks. I would appreciate any electronic resources preferably free that could help me get more

How would Big-O notation help in my day-to-day C# programming? Is it just an academic exercise? Todd Gamblin Big-O tells you the complexity of an algorithm in terms of the size of its inputs. This is essential if you want to know how algorithms will scale. If you're designing a big website and you have a lot of users, the time it takes you to handle those requests is important. If you have lots of data and you want to store it in a structure, you need to know how to do that efficiently if you're going to write something that doesn't take a million years to run. It's not that Big-O notation

In MySQL, an index type is a b-tree, and access an element in a b-tree is in logarithmic amortized time O(log(n)) . On the other hand, accessing an element in a hash table is in O(1) . Why is a hash table not used instead of a b-tree in order to access data inside a database? The Surrican You can only access elements by their primary key in a hashtable. This is faster than with a tree algorithm ( O(1) instead of log(n) ), but you cannot select ranges ( everything in between x and y ). Tree algorithms support this in Log(n) whereas hash indexes can result in a full table scan O(n) . Also the

I'm looking for information on how to implement binary heaps efficiently. I feel like there should be a nice article somewhere about implementing heaps efficiently, but I haven't found one. In fact I've been unable to find any resources on the matter of efficient implementation beyond the basics like storing the heap in an array. I'm looking for techniques for making a fast binary heap beyond the ones I describe below. I've already written a C++ implementation that is faster than Microsoft Visual C++'s and GCC's std::priority_queue or using std::make_heap, std::push_heap and std::pop_heap. The