Comment by tamnd
11 hours ago
Sedgewick's Algorithms book is great for practical learning but too tied to Java and implementation details. It is a bit shallow on theory, though the community and resources for other languages help.
That said, I personally prefer Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) for its formal rigor and clear proofs, and Grokking Algorithms for building intuition.
The broader goal of this project is to build a well tested, reference quality set of implementations in C, Python, and Go. That is the next milestone.
Possibly you mean "too tied to Pascal" ;-)
Was the very first edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms written in Pascal? I heard that but never actually saw that version myself.
Your comment brought back an old memory for me. My first programming language in high school was Turbo Pascal. That IDE was amazing: instant compilation, the blue screen TUI, F1 for inline help, a surprisingly good debugger, and it just felt so smooth and fast back then. No internet needed, no AI assistance, just pure focus and curiosity. Oh, how I really miss those days :)
I think the first several editions (two? three?) were in Pascal, yeah.
The first time I saw TP was on my uncle's Kaypro, which was sort of even more amazing: the screen wasn't capable of blue, the keyboard didn't have an F1 key, and the CPU wasn't capable of instant compilation. But the alternatives were assembly language and Microsoft BASIC!
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Sedgewick is available for C also.
For clarification, I meant the Algorithms, 4th Edition book at https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/ which is entirely in Java. All the example code, libraries, and exercises there use Java, and the authors explicitly note that the book is written for that language.
However, you are right, Prof. Sedgewick has long maintained versions of his material across multiple languages. I remember that the third edition has C, C++ and Java versions.