Informative
This book is quite informative on its subject; however, it is not the easiest to read.
the best network flow book for computer scientists
I've been using this book as the primary text for my class in
"Network Flow Programming" (senior & graduate level) at the
University of Tennessee for about 10 years. Prior to that time
I had used Jensen & Barnes' Network Flow Programming (now long out
of print). The code in Jensen & Barnes is in FORTRAN (not so fun
or useful for CS majors) and the intended audience seemed to be OR.
Ahuja's code is pascal pseudo-code for the most part, which usually
translates easily into the C language that most of our students
use.
For CS students, there is excellent use of algorithm analysis
(big-O) throughout the book, and there are long discussions
about different approaches and algorithms and the complexity of
each. There is a lot of mathematical notation, but my students
have never had to worry about PDEs and the like here. Any good
advanced CS student (graduate or undergraduate) will find the
book very worthwhile. In my course the students must implement
min-cost spanning trees, shortest paths, critical path/PERT
networks (not in Ahuja), max flow, and min-cost flow. I would
also recommend (for CS majors) Tarjan's excellent (and
succinct) Data Structures and Network Algorithms.
Good Introductory Book
This is a good introductory book. I particularly liked the applications of the problems, introduced in the book. The main negative point that I could mention is, the redundant explanations and discussions you might see in different chapters. I would say the volume of the book could have been reduced by some 15%-20%, if the authors had chosen to be more concise.
The book, Combinatorial Optimization by William J. Cook, et al, is an alternative. It covers a whole lot of topics and is just too succinct, a little more elaboration would have been appreciated !
Great book for Network Theory and Application
This book contains a lot of great algorithms for network flow theory and it also contains many of the great applications, which are very useful in practice. This book is very completed. Personally, I learn a lot of new things about Multi commodity Flow, which are the use of Lagrangian Relaxation, Column generation, Resource allocation techniques for solving multi commodity flow. There are also the good chapters in Convex cost flow and Generalized Flow and good appendix in complexity. Beside this book is very easy to read and understand. It is a great idea to have if you are in OR or IE major. :)
Great book for Network Theory and Application
This book contains a lot of great algorithms for network flow theory and it also contains many of the great applications, which are very useful in practice. This book is very completed. Personally, I learn a lot of new things about Multi commodity Flow, which are the use of Lagrangian Relaxation, Column generation, Resource allocation techniques for solving multi commodity flow. There are also the good chapters in Convex cost flow and Generalized Flow and good appendix in complexity. Beside this book is very easy to read and understand. It is a great idea to have if you are in OR or IE major. :)
(11 reviews)
