Reviews for Approximation Algorithms

The average rating for Approximation Algorithms based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-19 00:00:00 Caryn Gudde Amazon 2009-03-19. I was sparked to finally order this by Alan Fay adding it with five stars, and I'm certainly not going to allow myself to be outread by Alan Fay when it comes to theoretical computer science books written at my own Institute of Technology. Vazirani keeps the royalty statements for this book, courtesy of Cambridge Publishing, taped to the outside of his office -- he makes not cent one, in his own self-sacrificing protest against the price of scientific literature. I've said it once, and I'll say it again: Vazirani for President!

Review # 2 was written on 2020-12-24 00:00:00 Alisia Kley Let's be concrete. The first part of the book presents a set of classical NP hard problems, set covering, bin packing, knapsack, etc. and their approximation algorithms. These algorithms are extracted from a number of fundamental papers, which are of long, delicate presentations. Vazirami presented the problems and solutions in a unified framework. The presentation appears much shorter than they were in the original papers, and they are concise, precise, explicit and comprehensive. For an algorithm researcher, if he read the book first and then those papers, he will be much more efficient than doing that other way (as I and many other people did.) The second part of the book present the LP scheme of approximation algorithm design. I had little knowledge about this. But to pursue a career as an algorithm researcher, I must know this. Vazirani's book gives me a comprehensive (yet short) start. I rarely give my reviews five stars (2% of my reviews get 5 stars so far), but this book deserves.