[ Book Review ]: Grokking Algorithms

In my life Algorithms is that pretty girl that always seems out of your league. All my undergrad years, I've tried to gain mastery over her but failed, and later slipped onto the development path. But the curiosity to understand the cruxes of how these algorithms work, and moreover to analyze and build one that can solve problems has forever been my unfulfilled wish, not anymore.

When I first encountered this book, the very idea of explaining complex topics through analogies and illustrations was the center of attraction to me. This in fact is the same methodology I use whenever I'm asked to explain something to someone.

Since I have my bachelor's in Computer science, I was familiar with almost all the topics in this book. Therefore I felt that this book could act as the best introductory handbook that an undergrad could use before stepping onto his bachelor's education.

All in all, this book solidifies fundamental concepts and brings out that very persona in you who made you pick this stream as a career. It does a good job of showing that the most popular algorithms are nothing but intuitive constructs that we have been using subconsciously. I was so thrilled when I found out that Dijkstra's algorithm that I had written after reading this book, outperformed me when I was doing a dry run. I was so confident that the shortest path is 10 and can't be 8 when the algo that I had written returned 8 for the exact same input. It took me a while, to realize that I had actually overlooked a path that goes across the starting and ending node. That very feeling when your algorithm performs better than you is something that's worth experiencing.

If you are a CS enthusiast or a working professional or CS student or know someone who's getting into this field please hand them over this book as a career-warming present. It's such a pleasant read that it gets finished in a breeze.

Here's the link, if you want to purchase one: amzn.to/3BUES4r

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