xviii Preface
Web site
You c an use our Web site, http://mitpres s.m it.edu/algorithms/, to obtain s u pple-
mentary information and to communicate with us. The Web site links to a list of
known errors, solutions to selected exercises and problems, and (of course) a list
explaining the corny professor jokes, as well as other content that we might add.
The Web site also tells you how to report errors or make suggestions.
How we p roduced this book
Like the second edition, the third edition was produced in L
A
T
E
X2
"
.Weusedthe
Times font with mathematics typeset using the MathTime Pro 2 fonts. We thank
Michael Spivak from Publish or Perish, Inc., Lance Carnes from Personal TeX,
Inc., and Tim Tregubov from Dartmouth College for technical support. As in the
previous two editions, we compiled the index using Windex, a C program that we
wrote, and the bibliography was produced with B
IBT
E
X. The PDF files for this
book were created on a MacBook running OS 10.5.
We drew the illustrations for the third edition using MacDraw Pro, with some
of the mathematical expressions in illustrations laid in with the psfrag package
for L
A
T
E
X2
"
.Unfortunately,MacDrawProislegacysoftware,havingnotbeen
marketed for over a decade now. Happily, we still have a couple of Macintoshes
that can run the Classic environment under OS 10.4, and hence they can run Mac-
Draw Pro—mostly. Even under the Classic environment, we find MacDraw Pro to
be far easier to use than any other drawing software for the types of illustrations
that accompany computer-science text, and it produces beautiful output.
1
Who
knows how long our pre-Intel Macs will continue to run, so if anyone from Apple
is listening: Please create an OS X-compatible version of MacDraw Pro!
Acknowledgments for the third edition
We have been working with the MIT Press for over two decades now, and what a
terrific relationship it has been! We thank Ellen Faran, Bob Prior, Ada Brunstein,
and Mary Reilly for their help and support.
We were geographically distributed while producing the third edition, working
in the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science, the MIT Computer
1
We investigated several drawing programs that run under Mac OS X, but all had significant short-
comings compared with MacDraw Pro. We briefly attempted to produce the illustrations for this
book with a different, well known drawing program. We found that it took at least five times as long
to produce each illustration as it took with MacDraw Pro, and the resulting illustrations did not look
as good. Hence the decision to revert to MacDraw Pro running on older Macintoshes.