Programming Foundations: Algorithms

Algorithms are the universal building blocks of programming. They power the software you use every day, whether it's a spreadsheet, a social network, or a driving assistant. Algorithms offer a way to think about programming challenges in plain English, before they are translated into a specific language like C# or JavaScript. In this course, author and developer Joe Marini explains some of the most popular and useful algorithms for searching and sorting information, working with techniques like recursion, and understanding common data structures. He also discusses the performance implications of different algorithms and how to evaluate the performance of a given algorithm. Each algorithm is shown in practice in Python, but the lessons can be applied to any programming language.

Course Contents

Introduction

Algorithms power the world 1m 2s

What you should know 1m 35s

Overview

What are algorithms? 2m 44s

Common algorithms in programming 5m 42s

Measuring algorithm performance 3m 47s

Common Data Structures

Introduction to data structures 1m 56s

Arrays 2m 29s

Linked lists 2m 36s

Linked lists walkthrough 7m 35s

Stacks and queues 2m 43s

Stacks and queues walkthrough 6m 2s

Hash tables 7m 59s

Recursion

Understanding recursion 3m 38s

Simple recursion example 3m 9s

Power and factorial 4m 14s

Sorting Data

Overview of sorting 2m 4s

The bubble sort5m 8s

The merge sort 2m 24s

Implement the merge sort 5m 10s

The quicksort 3m 31s

Implement the quicksort 5m 39s

Searching Data

Unordered list search 3m 45s

Ordered list search 5m 30s

Determine if a list is sorted 3m 37s

Other Algorithms

Unique filtering with hash table 3m 25s

Value counting with hash table 3m 4s

Find max value recursively 3m 44s

Conclusions

Next steps 1m 18s