This concise textbook has been primarily designed for undergraduate students
as a very first course in programming. The book requires no prior knowledge of
programming nor algorithms. It provides a gentle introduction to these topics.
The contents of this book have been organized into ten chapters split over two
parts, as follows:
– The first part is concerned with getting ready to program basic tasks using
the modern language JavaTM. The fundamental notions of variables, expressions,
assignments with type checking are first explained. We present the
conditional and loop statements that allow programmers to control the instruction
work flows. The concepts of functions with pass-by-value arguments
and recursion are explained. We proceed by presenting arrays and data encapsulation
using objects, and insist on the notion of references for the latter.
– The second part of the book focuses on data-structures and algorithms. We
first describe the fundamental sequential and bisection search techniques, and
analyze their respective efficiency using complexity analysis. Since the effective
bisection search requires sorted data, we then explain basic iterative and
recursive sorting algorithms. We follow by explaining linked lists and describe
common insertion/deletion/merge operations on them. We then introduce
the concept of abstract data-structures (illustrating them with queues and
stacks) and explain how to program them in Java using the object-oriented
style methods. Finally, the last chapter is an introduction to more evolved
algorithmic tasks that tackle combinatorial optimization problems.