Book excerpts:

The primary goal of this book is to promote object-oriented design using C# and to illustrate the use of the emerging object-oriented design patterns. Experienced object-oriented programmers find that certain ways of doing things work best and that these ways occur over and over again. The book shows how these patterns are used to create good software designs. In particular, the following design patterns are used throughout the text: singleton, container, enumeration, adapter and visitor.

Virtually all of the data structures are presented in the context of a single, unified, polymorphic class hierarchy. This framework clearly shows the relationships between data structures and it illustrates how polymorphism and inheritance can be used effectively. In addition, algorithmic abstraction is used extensively when presenting classes of algorithms. By using algorithmic abstraction, it is possible to describe a generic algorithm without having to worry about the details of a particular concrete realization of that algorithm.

A secondary goal of the book is to present mathematical tools just in time. Analysis techniques and proofs are presented as needed and in the proper context. In the past when the topics in this book were taught at the graduate level, an author could rely on students having the needed background in mathematics. However, because the book is targeted for second and third-year students, it is necessary to fill in the background as needed. To the extent possible without compromising correctness, the presentation fosters intuitive understanding of the concepts rather than mathematical rigor.

This book presents the various data structures and algorithms as complete C# program fragments. All the program fragments presented in this book have been extracted automatically from the source code files of working and tested programs. It has been tested that by developing the proper abstractions, it is possible to present the concepts as fully functional programs without resorting to pseudo-code or to hand-waving.

This book does not teach the basics of programming. It is assumed that you have taken an introductory course in programming and that you have learned how to write a program in C#. That is, you have learned the rules of C# syntax and you have learned how to put together C# statements in order to solve rudimentary programming problems.