Friday, July 07, 2017

Mitzenmacher and Upfal, 2nd Edition

The word is that the 2nd edition of our book is now (finally) available/in stock at Amazon.  You can tell it's the 2nd edition, because the "Alice cover" is now in blue -- I think it's a good look. But even more than that, there's 100+ pages of new material, on things like VC dimension and Rademacher complexity, power laws, normal distributions, cuckoo hashing, algorithmic versions of the Lovasz local lemma, and more.  More exercises and such, too. (Of course, it's still got the good old stuff, including standards like Chernoff bounds, balls and bins, the probabilistic method, and so on.)  So if you've never bought it, now is the time to buy, and if you have bought it, give the old edition to a friend and buy the new version for yourself.

If you're getting it from Amazon, here's a friendly link below, which will give me some Amazon credit.  Thanks!


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks. Just ordered it. I liked the previous edition.

Would you say it's a good book for someone interested in computational complexity, that would like to understand better also probabilistic arguments abundant nowadays in complexity? Or would you say your book is more adequate for researchers in Algorithms?

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

I think it's a good book for both camps, in that it covers the key basic techniques (and some advanced techniques) used throughout computer science. For specific topics (in either algorithms or computational complexity), you'd probably need more specific sources.

Anonymous said...

Why are there still no references?

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

Because that's the way we decided to do it; as explained in the first edition, it seems a bit more reader-friendly to a more general audience.

Anonymous said...

Whenever I teach some course on Probability \cap Computing I use some hours to talk about streaming. To me it seems one of the important and cute applications of randomization. Just a thought in case you ever prepare a 3rd edition.