TextBook
  1. Information about the textbook is available in Handout 1.
  2. Note that the textbook is common to all sections (Fall or Spring)
     and is jointly agreed and announced before the beginning of an 
     academic year by all the instructors who were to be teachning this
     class in the Fall semester. I was not one of them.
  3. There have been some questions on how the textbook will be used
     in this class. Attached below is a summary of my responses.

  4. The textbook includes most of the material that will be covered
     in this class and that is usually covered in an introductory
     master's level graduate course. Some additional material may
     exist in the textbook in the form of exercises.
  5. Algorithm descriptions will be presented in class in pseudocode
     that resembles C/C++. I have modified my notes to be consistent
     with the designated textbook (Sahni) and also the alternative
     textbook (Cormen et al).  Of course, in the pseudocode variable
     declarations/definitions are ignored or minimally considered. This
     pseudocode if translated into C++ by a competent programmer
     (of CIS 505 or 601 background for example) can turn into
     C++ code that is identical or very close to the code of the textbook.
  6. Students could potentially use other textbooks for further reading.
     Reference points however would be the lecture notes and the textbook.
     If a student uses another reference, he/she is on his/her own in
     dealing with discrepancies between the material in the 
     lecture notes/textbook and the ones appearing in other references.
     If lecture notes/textbook says A and the other reference says B,
     A is valid for example in homeworks and exams (although this would
     be very unlikely). Algorithms of the textbook/lecture notes can be
     used as black-boxes without any further description (e.g. if one wants
     to use the code for Insertion in an AVL tree, one can cite the
     textbook algorithm as AVLInsert, and use it as AVLInsert(T,x) to
     insert key x into an AVL tree T).