Show HN: I'm writing an illustrated introduction to algorithms [pdf]
manning.com
manning.com
(1)Could you reword this ? "You could start at the start" - to something like "You start at the beginning of the Phone book" Or "you could start searching from the beginning of the book". This sounds really conversational , in fact a lot of the text sounds conversational , I suppose you wanted it to be that way !
(2)What is figure 1.2 for ? Is it to accompany the text that says "Now suppose you log on to facebook" ? The picture here doesn't seem to serve any purpose. I guess it could go to the side of the page when eventually typeset. When I see a picture in between paragraphs , I automatically think of it as an explanatory picture and not something that has been added for 'fun factor'
(3) And figure 1.3 is not doing a good job at explaining itself too :( Is that hour-glass shape 'the algorithm' in itself ?
(4) The number guessing game and all of the associated illustrations are nice.
(5) "1.2.1 Algorithm speed is not measured in seconds" is really cool. I had a lot of troubles understanding why asymptotic analysis was necessary when I was first introduced to it. This sort of explains clearly that "seconds" is not the metric for analyzing the speed of algorithms. upvoting this part of the book :)
Good luck !
1. I will change this.
2. The formatting is misleading here. The final book will have very different formatting. There are a lot of "fun" images in the book, but it is confusing that they still have a label like "figure 1.2". They serve no purpose except to provide a mental break.
3. This figure got removed in a rewrite.
4 & 5. Thanks!
The half off code is dotd081814au at www.manning.com/bhargava.