The Algorithm Design Manual

"To me, this book is an illustration of the power of names. Today, in the era of Google, if you know the name of something, you can find out about it with a simple search. But if you don’t know of what you’re looking for, it suddenly becomes much harder to find it. Having in the back of your head the names of common algorithms that help you solve problems is really powerful. When you identify a new problem, it helps you to come up with ideas, for example to use breadth-first search , or a binary tree , etc. Yes, it’s good to acquire a sense of that. A lot of statistical theory is about measuring what happens to mathematical properties when some variable x goes to infinity, without thinking about what then happens to computational properties. But if your algorithm needs n² computations, it doesn’t matter if x goes to infinity, because you’ll never be able to compute that."