Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)By far, the hardest part of teaching programming classes is evaluating the programs. Unless you have the students do only simplistic programs, they are difficult to read and running the executables does not always give an accurate appraisal of what was done. One possible solution to this educational conundrum is to take advantage of the robot judge maintained at the book's companion web site.
The book contains many problems to be solved via a program that must accept inputs having a specific, albeit general format and then produce the appropriate output. The robot judge is capable of evaluating programs written in Pascal, C, C++ and Java and it will return one of eleven different results, all of which are two letter acronyms. If the program is not given a passing grade, then the message will not be of much benefit.
The problems are placed in several categories, including sorting, combinatorics, number theory, graph traversal, grid operations and geometry. I identified several that I can and most likely will use as assignments the next time I teach basic programming. While some problems require significant background information, in general it is not so great that it is beyond the bounds of what can be done in a basic computing class. The problems were originally created to prepare students for programming contests, so the level of difficulty is such that they could not be used until later in a beginning course. However, the book would be an excellent text for any advanced programming class where the students are split into teams. Each chapter begins with primer material for the problems given in that chapter and I included it in my best books of the year 2003 column for the online "Journal of Object Technology".
Click Here to see more reviews about: Programming Challenges
The challenges of problems from international programming competitions are an effective way to improve your algorithmic and coding skills and understanding.This volume uses international programming competition-type problems to motivate the study of algorithms, programming, and other topics in computer science. The book includes more than 100 programming challenges, as well as the theory and key concepts necessary for approaching them. Problems are organized by topic, and supplemented by complete tutorial material. Readers gain a concrete understanding of both algorithmic techniques and advanced coding topics. Unique Features:* Offers a wealth of rich programming problems suitable for self-study -- all with on-line judging at www.programming-challenges.com* Presents practice training for all major programming contests -- ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC), International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and Topcoder Challenge* Serves as a convenient, web-based means of adding a programming component to any algorithms or software engineering course * Contains complete working code for fundamental data structures and graph, string, numerical and geometric algorithms* Provides a brief-yet-thorough treatment of key elements in number theory, geometry, dynamic programming, and graph algorithms * Supports all popular programming languages (C, C++, Pascal, Java)Steven S. Skiena is a member of the faculty of computer science at SUNY Stony Brook and is author of many widely used books, including The Algorithm Design Manual. He received the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Undergraduate Teaching Award. Miguel Revilla is a member of the faculty of computer science at the University of Valladolid, Spain. He is official website archivist of the ACM ICPC and creator/maintainer of the primary robot-judge, contest-hosting website.
Click here for more information about Programming Challenges
0 comments:
Post a Comment