pjd

pjd

A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms, Second Edition: suggestion for sum_swap example (page 413)

Maybe you were just trying to keep the sum_swap code clean and streamlined for ease of reading, but this method didn’t seem as air-tight as other example methods in the book. You may want to at least comment that not all cases are handled by the method.

Two ways I think this method might fail are 1) the method does not handle the case where swapping to even out the sums is not possible, and 2) since shift_amount is calculated with integer division and thus will always be an integer, I suspect that sum_swap could give an incorrect answer if sum_1 - sum_2 is an odd number.

Then again, maybe those types of caveats are understood and maybe I missed other such scenarios elsewhere in the book.

I’m getting close to the end…finally! Great book, very well-written and helpful for me!

Most Liked

jaywengrow

jaywengrow

Author of A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

Thank you! Currently, the method does handle cases where swapping the sums isn’t possible, as it returns nil at the end. However, you are correct about the odd number issue. I will handle this in a future version. Good catch!

Where Next?

Popular Pragmatic Bookshelf topics Top

abtin
page 20: … protoc command… I had to additionally run the following go get commands in order to be able to compile protobuf code using go...
New
jon
Some minor things in the paper edition that says “3 2020” on the title page verso, not mentioned in the book’s errata online: p. 186 But...
New
edruder
I thought that there might be interest in using the book with Rails 6.1 and Ruby 2.7.2. I’ll note what I needed to do differently here. ...
New
Chrichton
Dear Sophie. I tried to do the “Authorization” exercise and have two questions: When trying to plug in an email-service, I found the ...
New
swlaschin
The book has the same “Problem space/Solution space” diagram on page 18 as is on page 17. The correct Problem/Solution space diagrams ar...
New
leba0495
Hello! Thanks for the great book. I was attempting the Trie (chap 17) exercises and for number 4 the solution provided for the autocorre...
New
curtosis
Running mix deps.get in the sensor_hub directory fails with the following error: ** (Mix) No SSH public keys found in ~/.ssh. An ssh aut...
New
adamwoolhether
I’m not quite sure what’s going on here, but I’m unable to have to containers successfully complete the Readiness/Liveness checks. I’m im...
New
andreheijstek
After running /bin/setup, the first error was: The foreman' command exists in these Ruby versions: That was easy to fix: gem install fore...
New
mcpierce
@mfazio23 I’ve applied the changes from Chapter 5 of the book and everything builds correctly and runs. But, when I try to start a game,...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Hello Devtalk World! Please let us know a little about who you are and where you’re from :nerd_face:
New
siddhant3030
I’m thinking of buying a monitor that I can rotate to use as a vertical monitor? Also, I want to know if someone is using it for program...
New
AstonJ
Curious to know which languages and frameworks you’re all thinking about learning next :upside_down_face: Perhaps if there’s enough peop...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
From finance to artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms are a powerful tool with a wide array of applications. But you don't need an ...
New
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
AstonJ
We’ve talked about his book briefly here but it is quickly becoming obsolete - so he’s decided to create a series of 7 podcasts, the firs...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
A concise guide to MySQL 9 database administration, covering fundamental concepts, techniques, and best practices. Neil Smyth MySQL...
New

Sub Categories: