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Ask DT: Best texts to sharpen your CS fundamentals?
4 points by _jjac 3558 days ago | 4 comments
Hi folks.

I'm a data scientist from a physics/engineering background and I'm really looking to improve my knowledge of the fundamentals in computer science - especially from an algorithm perspective.

I'm looking for recommendations on useful algorithm overview texts that would be particularly useful for data scientists (applicable to wrangling, pre-processing and big data problems).

This thread might also be useful for any other texts we can recommend each other to improve a particular area of programming/computer science - definitely feel it's an area I can improve one when chatting with back-end developers.



2 points by tfturing 3558 days ago | link

Could you be more specific regarding "CS fundamentals"? Getting better at programming and getting better at algorithms can be entirely different endeavors. On the one hand, there is Guttag's Intro to Comp Sci book (the edX MOOC as a whole is, in my opinion, the best MOOC on introductory CS using Python). Books like CLRS (mentioned by kdavis) will teach you how to construct efficient algorithms but won't teach you how to program per se (all in pseudocode).

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2 points by kdavis 3558 days ago | link

Introduction to Algorithms[1]

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-algorithms

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1 point by achompas 3555 days ago | link

Agreed with tfturing, it depends on what you're trying to do.

If you aim to simply write better software, check out The Pragmatic Programmer. Design-by-contract changed how I approach the act of writing software.

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1 point by skadamat 3558 days ago | link

Good exhaustive list here - www.datasciencemasters.org

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