Ask Slashdot: A Cookbook of Algorithms?

Quinn Weaver writes "Where can I find a book on the fundamental, generic algorithms that programmers often need? I'm not talking about something quite as low-level as routines for manipulating data structures, but rather about solutions to common problems you run into while writing a program: randomizing an array, for instance. I am a fairly young programmer, and I often find myself faced with a problem like this one, where I know what I want to do and can think of some stupid ways and a few clever ways to go about, but I always wonder if there's a better solution out there. I don't want to re-invent the wheel, especially if I end up leaving some spokes off.

What I'm seeking, therefore, is a sort of "recipe book" mapping common problems to tried-and-true solutions. I would like it to be as general as possible, striving for breadth instead of depth; I don't want a giant, exhaustive tome on random number generation or synchronous I/O or sorting, but rather a big reference full of the high points of several such tomes. Also for the sake of generality, I would prefer that it be written on the algorithmic level. I understand O'Reilly is coming out with a _Perl Cookbook_ that tries to provide such a resource for Perl. I'll probably buy it, but I suspect it won't be of much use for strongly typed languages with highly hierarchical class libraries instead of handfuls of functions. (C++ and Java come to mind.) While it's easy enough to translate syntax from one language to another, fancy built-in functions like Perl's _split_ take more effort to implement than my small subproblems should take to solve. "