Algorithmic Commonplaces

This book serves as a textbook for a sophomore-level course in data structures and algorithms. It assumes students have prior experience in programming, especially in an object-oriented setting, and knowledge of discrete mathematics. A course in data structures and algorithms systematizes what students already know about programming, endows that body of knowledge with rigor, and widens the variety of data structures and algorithmic techniques that students master. Everything that follows in the curriculum depends on it. This book does not attempt to be an encyclopedia of various data structures and algorithmic techniques. Instead, its focus is the themes—the loci or commonplaces—that tie the topics together. Nearly everything done in a course on data structures and algorithms can be knit from a few basic principles about how memory is structured and the cost of algorithmic elements. This book directs students’ attention to the story of how these elements can be adapted and recombined for better efficiency and more powerful problem solving.