📖 ADM Journey

My personal notes, implementations, and exercises as I work through The Algorithm Design Manual (3rd ed.) by Steven Skiena.

This isn't a polished project — it's a living document of me actually reading the book, implementing data structures from scratch, grinding through the war stories, and slowly building the algorithmic intuition that separates people who use algorithms from people who understand them.

---

📂 Structure

├── src/
│   ├── sorting/            ← sorting algorithms
│   ├── searching/          ← searching algorithms
│   ├── graphs/             ← graph traversal & weighted graph algorithms
│   ├── dynamic_programming/ ← DP implementations
│   ├── data_structures/    ← trees, heaps, hash tables, union-find, etc.
│   └── backtracking/       ← combinatorial search & pruning
└── docs/
    ├── chapter_01/         ← Introduction to Algorithm Design
    ├── chapter_02/         ← Algorithm Analysis
    ├── chapter_03/         ← Data Structures
    └── ...

---

📍 Progress

Chapter	Topic	Status
1	Introduction to Algorithm Design	✅ In Progress
2	Algorithm Analysis	🔲
3	Data Structures	🔲
4	Sorting and Searching	🔲
5	Graph Traversal	🔲
6	Weighted Graph Algorithms	🔲
7	Combinatorial Search and Heuristic Methods	🔲
8	Dynamic Programming	🔲
9	Intractable Problems and Approximation Algorithms	🔲
10	How to Design Algorithms	🔲

---

🛠️ How I Use This Repo

• src/ is organized by problem category, not by chapter. An implementation goes where it conceptually belongs — insertion sort lives in sorting/, not in chapter_04/. The goal is to be able to implement anything in there from memory, not to have a reference copy.

• docs/ is chapter-by-chapter notes written as I read — not summaries after the fact, but actual in-the-moment understanding being built up section by section. If something clicks, I write down why. If something doesn't, I write that down too.

• War stories get their own note in the relevant chapter folder. I focus on the thinking process Skienna demonstrates — how the problem was modeled, what failed first, what eventually worked.

---

🧠 Why This Book

Most algorithm resources teach you to recognize problem types and apply the right template. Skienna teaches you to model problems — to see the abstract structure underneath so you can reach for the right tool yourself.

Also the war stories are genuinely good.

---

Goal: finish the book, never look up "how does BFS work" again.