Useful Resources
- Illinois course materials
- Lecture notes, lecture videos, slides, lab handouts, homeworks, and exams are available for several past semesters of algorithms classes at Illinois. The TV emoji 📺 indicates classes with freely available lecture videos.
- Elsewhere
- It has sadly become much less common for instructors to maintain course materials on the open web. Most instructors (or perhaps more accurately, most universities) either lock their course materials inside walled gardens (“learning management systems”) or simply delete them when the course is over. Here are some useful exceptions.
- MOOCs
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Coursera, EdX and Udacity all offer complete algorithms courses, with videos, readings, and automatically graded exercises. By necessity, these courses tend to focus more on implementation and less on proofs and open-ended design than algorithms classes at Illinois.
- Udacity MOOCs are always freely available.
- EdX MOOCs are available only for enrolled students when the class is in session.
- All EdX courses on “algorithms”
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MicroMasters Program in Algorithms and Data Structures,
a series of eight MOOCs taught by Daniel Kane, Pavel Pevzner, and others,
loosely based on courses at UC San Diego
- Algorithm Design and Analysis
Part 1 and
Part 2,
taught by Tim Roughgarden, loosely based on algorithms courses at Stanford
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Advanced Algorithmics and Graph Theory with Python,
taught by Vincent Gripon, Patrick Meyer, Nicolas Farrugia,
Carlos Eduardo Rosar Kos Lassance,
and Ghouti Boukli Hacene at Institut Mines-Télécom
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Algorithms,
taught by Deepak Phatak, Nagesh Karmali, Ajit Diwan, and Ganesh Ramakrishnan at IIT Bombay
- Most Coursera classes require a $49/month subscription to access. (Pfft. Please. One of the O's in "MOOC" is supposed to stand for "Open"!) But there are a few exceptions:
- Algorithms Part 1 and Part 2, taught by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, loosely based on undergraduate algorithms classes at Princeton
- Analysis of Algorithms, taught by Robert Sedgewick, loosely based on a more advanced class at Princeton
- The Coursera algorithms courses from Stanford and UCSD are avialable for free on EdX.
- Khan Academy also hosts a free series of algorithms tutorials by Tom Cormen and Devin Balkcom.
- Free Online Textbooks
- Hopefully this list will continue to grow.
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Recommended:
Algorithms (and related course materials) by Jeff Erickson. Written for algorithms coufrses at Iklinois.
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Recommended:
Algorithms by Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou, and Umesh Vazirani (McGraw-Hill, 2006). Based on the undergraduate algorithms course at Berkeley. Drafts of individual chapters (0,
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10) are freely available. (Thanks, Umesh!)
- Dead Trees
- For students who prefer an offline reference made of bleached and stained cellulose, we recommend the following textbooks. The campus bookstore probably doesn't have them, but you can find them cheaper online anyway. And they're all in the library. You remember that big brick building with the coffee shop and the study tables in it? Yeah, believe it or not, they have actual books in the basement!
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You can buy paper copies of Jeff's book on Amazon, if you're into that sort of thing.
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Introduction to Algorithms (4th edition) by Tom Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ron Rivest, and Cliff Stein (MIT Press/McGraw-Hill, 2022). Based on algorithms classes at MIT. A significant fraction of (earlier editions of) this book has been transcribed into Wikipedia. Remarkably inexpensive for a full-color textbook that is thick enough to stun an ox.
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Algorithms Illuminated by Tim Roughgarden. Loosely based on algorithms classes at Stanford.
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Algorithms and Data Structures: The Basic Toolbox by Kurt Mehlhorn and Peter Sanders (Springer 2008). Tndividual chapters are freely available, but with "FREE COPY" plastered across each page in bright green.
- There are several other algorithms and theory of computation textbooks I'd love to recommend, but not at the ridiculous prices that their publishers charge. Shame on you, Pearson. Fuck you, Cengage.
- Review
- For review of prerequisite material, we strongly recommend the following online resources. (This stuff is also covered in several dead-tree textbooks, but really, why bother?)
- Other
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We'll add more links here as we discover them. Suggestions are welcome!