Preface

I first got into programming as a hobby. Visual Basic 6 for Dummies taught me the basics, and I kept reading books to learn more. But the subject of algorithms was impenetrable for me. I remember savoring the table of contents of my first algorithms book, thinking “I’m finally going to understand these topics!” But it was dense stuff, and I gave up after a few weeks. It wasn’t until I had my first good algorithms professor that I realized how simple and elegant these ideas were.

A few years ago, I wrote my first illustrated blog post. I’m a visual learner, and I really liked the illustrated style. Since then, I’ve written a few illustrated posts on functional programming, Git, machine learning, and concurrency. By the way: I was a mediocre writer when I started out. Explaining technical concepts is hard. Coming up with good examples takes time, and explaining a difficult concept takes time. So it’s easiest to gloss over the hard stuff. I thought I was doing a pretty good job, until after one of my posts got popular, a coworker came up to me and said, “I read your post and I still don’t understand this.” I still had a lot to learn about writing.

Somewhere in the middle of writing these blog posts, Manning reached out to me and asked if I wanted to write an illustrated book. Well, it turns out that Manning editors know a lot about explaining technical concepts, and they taught me how to teach. I wrote this book to scratch a particular itch: I wanted to write a book that explained hard technical topics well, and I wanted an easy-to-read algorithms book. My writing has come a long way since that first blog post, and I hope you find this book an easy and informative read.