Reviews for Introduction to computer applications for non-science students (BASIC)

The average rating for Introduction to computer applications for non-science students (BASIC) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-07 00:00:00 Terrance Kerrigan What a terrible book. Though it's the cornerstone of many CS undergrad algorithm courses, this book fails in every way. In almost every way, Dasgupta and Papadimitriou's "Algorithms" is a much better choice: It tries to be a reference book presenting a good summary of algorithms but any of the interesting bits are left as "exercises to the student." Many of these exercises are do-able but far from trivial mental connections. A few require some mental Ah Ha moments. It fails at being a reference book It tries to be a text book (didactic) but it is too verbose and goes into too much depth on every topic along the way to be a useful guide. A possibly more useful organization would have been to have 2 virtual books, the first a much shorter textbook, the second an algorithm reference. It fails at being a text book It tries to be a workbook by presenting many exercises to the reader. The problem is that it provides inadequate scaffolding. It just goes ahead and gives you the answers to what could have been medium difficulty questions (since it's trying to be a mostly complete reference). This gives you no chance to flex your mental muscle on tractable problems. All of the harder problems are left as exercises without much help of how to approach them.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-10 00:00:00 William Crane An essential book for every programmer, you can't read this kind of book on bus, you need to fully constraint while reading it. The exercises after each chapter are very important to fully understand the chapter you just read, and to activate your brain's neurons. The book in itself is an outstanding one, very organized, focused and small chapters makes it easier to understand the algorithms inside it. It contains the essential and most popular algorithms, so you can't live wthout it if you are real programmer. You can skip chapters/read about an algorithm you want to understand more, as if there is a previous idea/algorithm the authors directly mention that with chapter's number so you can go directly to it for more information. I've read the 2nd edition, and now reading this one, the 3rd edition.