At a Minimum, You Saw This

In this chapter, you learned the following:

• The most effective way to design algorithms is to use top-down design, in which goals are broken down into subgoals until the steps are small enough to be translated directly into a programming language.

• Almost all problems have more than one correct solution. Choosing between them often involves a trade-off between simplicity and performance.

• The performance of a program can be characterized by how much time and memory it uses. This can be determined experimentally by profiling its execution. One way to profile time is with function perf_counter from module time.