In the past I've primarily used two sources as reference material while implementing AVL trees: the example in Mastering Algorithms with Perl from O'Reilly, and Robert Sedgewick's description of the implementation from his book Algorithms. Both of thes

Pattern132 is an interesting problem I've seen floating around on various message boards. It is a constraint satisfaction problem that I've seen all manner of solutions for ranging from dynamic programming, to straight brute force iteration. When I fir

Functional Programming with Java

Early in my career, I had a lead developer on a project who during code review, much to my chagrin, kept making me re-write what was in my opinion “perfectly good, working code”. To my lead however

Unique Collections

 Knowing that a collection is comprised of unique only items if a very useful thing indeed. It's so useful that this concept is the basis of one of the fundamental data structure: the Set. While this is not the on

Ahh, Heaps. 

Heaps are one of those data structures that turn up everywhere. They serve a humble purpose: find the maximum value (depending on if you're using min or max ordering) of a set efficiently. It is this very purpose that imbues