Part III: The Product

Now comes the fun. Parts I and II laid a foundation; the next five columns use that material to build interesting programs. The problems are important in themselves, and they provide focal points where the techniques of previous columns converge in real applications.

Column 11 describes several general-purpose sorting algorithms. Column 12 describes a particular problem from a real application (generating a random sample of integers), and shows how it can be attacked in a variety of ways. One approach is to view it as a problem in set representation, which is the subject of Column 13. Column 14 introduces the heap data structure, and shows how it yields efficient algorithms for sorting and for priority queues. Column 15 tackles several problems that involve searching for words or phrases in very long text strings.