Jewels of Stringology

Rating:
Summary: nice book
Review: The book is an excellent presentation of algorithms on the conceptual level and
avoids implementation details. This does not mean that it
has no practical value. The understanding and simplification of an algorithm
is the first main step towards its practicality. The issues of implementation
details would double the size of the book and obscure the main ideas.
The great advantage of the currenct version are conciseness and simplicity.
Despite that it is a "parade" of a huge number of classical important algorithms.
The style is reader-friendly and very algorithmic. The main issue is the
understanding how an algorithm works. Many inherently complex
and famous algorithms are presented in a simplified way.
The book can be used as a companion book in courses on algorithms
and data structures at any level. The required theoretical background
is reduced to minimum. The area is underrepresented in most general
textbooks on algorithms and data structures, and the book fills

the gap nicely.

The title is well chosen, the presented algorithms are real "jewels"
and the word "stringology" is a good nickname for the area, it has
been invented before by other people and is generally accepted in the
community of people doing text algorithmics.

The book is a simplified and modernized version of "Text algorithms" by
the same authors. The difficult algorithms are omitted or rewritten.
The main audience targeted by the book are the undergraduate and

graduate students. Most classical algorithms are easily understandable,
since they use only the very simple data structure: 1-dimenesional array.
It gives a source of algorithmically valuable algorithms (in sense of teaching
algorithm courses) with a very simple implementation, the knowledge of
any programming language at a very beginning level is just enough. Basic
string algorithms can be swallowed by an undergraduate student much easier
than for example graph algorithms.

Altogether the book is an excellent text on algorithms.

Rating:
Summary: Theoretical rather than practical
Review: The book loses one star because it's primarily a presentation of algorithms that are theoretically interesting, rather than algorithms that are good to use. I doubt very much that the authors have any real software engineering experience.

It loses another star because the writing style is so awkward and painful to read. The authors don't appear to be native speakers of English, and it shows. The text really needs to be cleaned up by an editor familar with idiomatic English.

Bottom line: If you actually need to implement a string search, look elsewhere for guidance...