This tutorial is drawn from my book The Art of Clean Code (NoStarch 2022): Write Clean & Simple Code Story: I learned to focus on writing clean code the hard way. One of my research projects during my time as a doctoral researcher in distributed systems was to code a distributed graph processing system from … Read more
Caesar Cipher is a simple encryption and obfuscation method. It’s a straightforward substitution cipher that replaces each plain text character with the obfuscated character obtained by shifting the plain text character a fixed number of positions in the alphabet. What is Cryptography? Before we introduce our first cryptographic algorithm, Caesar’s cipher, let’s first introduce cryptography … Read more
This article presents an algorithmic problem with practical value for stock market analysis. For instance, suppose you are trading the cryptocurrency Ethereum. How much profit in dollars can you make by buying low and selling high based on historical data? Maximum Profit Basic Algorithm The max profit algorithm calculates the maximum profit you’d obtain by … Read more
The most Pythonic way to convert a list of integers ints to a list of strings is to use the one-liner strings = [str(x) for x in ints]. It iterates over all elements in the list ints using list comprehension and converts each list element x to a string using the str(x) constructor. This article … Read more
You can check out the slide deck here to get a first intuition on how the algorithm works: Before we’ll dive into the algorithm and the Python implementation, let’s first skim over some related graph tutorials you may enjoy and that may help your understanding! Related Graph Tutorials This algorithm is part of our graph … Read more
You can check out the slides here (direct PDF link): Before we’ll dive into the algorithm and the Python implementation, let’s first skim over some related graph tutorials you may enjoy and that may help your understanding! Related Graph Tutorials This algorithm is part of our graph algorithm tutorials: Breadth-First Search (BFS) Algorithm in Python … Read more
As you watch the video, you can have a look at the slides as PDF: download slides in a new tab here. Before we’ll dive into the algorithm and the Python implementation, let’s first skim over some related graph tutorials you may enjoy and that may help your understanding! Related Graph Tutorials This algorithm is … Read more
This is a simple algorithm to find all the powersets of a given set. If you feel like you need to refresh your Python set skills, have a look at my complete guide to Python sets (with Harry Potter examples). Problem Formulation: Powerset What is the powerset of a given set s? The powerset is … Read more
Motivation Type “helo world” into your Google search bar and Google will ask you: “Did you mean: hello world”. How is this done? A simple method to detect these typos is the Levenshtein distance (also called edit distance). In fact, Google’s algorithm seems to use some variant of it. (source) By studying this article, you’ll … Read more
In this article, you’ll learn about a basic algorithm, every computer scientist must know: the binary search algorithm. I have drawn the code from my NoStarch programming introductory book Python One-Liners: Applications Binary Search The algorithm has important practical applications in many basic data structures such as sets, trees, dictionaries, bags, bag trees, bag dictionaries, … Read more
Python es potente: puedes condensar muchos algoritmos en una sola línea de código. Así que surge la pregunta natural: ¿se puede escribir un bucle for en una sola línea de código? Este artículo explora con todo detalle esta cuestión fundamental. ¿Cómo escribir un bucle for en una sola línea de código Python? Hay dos formas … Read more
Quicksort is not only a popular question in many code interviews – asked by Google, Facebook, and Amazon – but also a practical sorting algorithm that is fast, concise, and readable. Because of its beauty, you won’t find many introductions to algorithms that don’t discuss the Quicksort algorithm. In this one-liner tutorial, you’ll learn about … Read more