The fourth week of my coursera algorithms course is done.
We learned about heap sort, binary search trees and priority queues. This is the first week when I feel like I am learning something that I am unfamiliar with. In previous weeks, I had a lot of experience studying and using all of the concepts already.
When I hear a problem, my mind visualizes the data using a few common data structures (maybe a stack/queue/sorted array or list/or a tree). For some reason, I don't immediately think about priority queues. This week's lectures reminded me of the importance and power of them. I think I should go back and review the material one more time to further engrain the concepts.
Because I had a day off this week, I was able to finish all of the material this week with a lot of time to spare.
I look forward to the upcoming week's lessons. In it, we will learn about red/black trees and other balanced search trees. This is one of the holes in my computer science knowledge that I'd really like to eliminate.
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