Algorithms to Live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Fantastic book Gets more intriguing as we read A Different perspective which the author has shared after reading the book becomes more evident in daily life

Awesome book and good quality.

Opened my mind up to solve issues from my life with an analytical approach

A very enjoyable read, and plenty of food for thought. There is almost no mathematics and no programming in this book, so don't let the title put you off. The book uses the computational approach to problems to take the reader through its analysis of the everyday examples of various "algorithms to live by", meaning in most cases the computational effort and stress that humans undergo when they process information to make a decision. If you have read or studied algorithms in a computer science context this book will not tax you, but it helps put computational complexity and decision making in a real-world context, and I found this entertaining and thought-provoking. It touches lightly on some of the key themes of algorithms such as complexity, hardness, tractability and more so on optimisation. I am not sure if these topics are dealt with fully enough to introduce them to readers that encounter them for the first time in this book, with the exception of optimisation, which is very well put. But if you are aware of these themes, it is nice to have the formal references in the discussions that the book takes you through. In the early chapters, I had the impression that I was going to have to branch out to other reference material to research the example problems covered. Actually I didn't - though there's nothing to stop you doing that of course. The main diversion I made was writing a program to test the 37% rule for the "Secretary Problem". The book is nicely sectioned into chapters and topics or themes within the chapters. This makes it easy to read continuously or to stop, think and look to external references if you need to, before returning to continue. I think that other than the subject matter itself, the structure of the book is excellent and wish that other books adopted a similar format this to help the reader mark their progress easily. It's a very good example of sign-posting through manageable chunks of text. The Notes section is extensive. I read only some of them, but they are there for the reader's elucidation.

If you are interested in something about algorithms, you should read this book. I read it both in English and in Japanese. My impression from the book is different in original and translation. Japanese translation is excellent, but if you want to have some insight from this book, English version is better for the Japanese. But you can check your English understanding, Japanese version is very helpful. I bought this book to increase my understanding how to program python. Because I want to brash up my knowledge of computer and algorithms. However, this book is very useful for brash up my life itself.