3

Introduction

3

Chapter 11 pulls in all the skills learnt in the previous chapters to create a visual­

ization that is complex, relevant, and complete.

The book is not meant to be a formal theoretical dissertation. Each chapter is an

experiment—​a story of success where a human being was able to build something

awesome by using the power of Excel on your laptop and a little bit of coding. The

original codes in this book are written by me on a Windows computer, but they would

work on Macs as well with very few, if any, compatibility issues.

The code provided in this book is written in a simple way that does not confuse

the reader with complex computer science rigors of efficient coding. There are no

materials that are devoted to explain good coding practices, best ways to name vari­

ables, quickest way to do a sort or the explanation of memory management. These

are important—​but the emphasis here is on how to solve a problem with a quick and

intuitive way to code the algorithm. There are many books available for the “science”,

but very few on the “art” of solving.

You may ultimately want to be a developer and even a computer scientist but right

now all you need is to understand the technique of building an algorithm.

The code used in this book is available for you to download on the publisher’s site,

along with a few videos on some chapters to get you started.

To maximize your learning, you have to practice the code, test it out yourself, and

build it further to address your specific needs.

Like Logic &

Math?

This book

is for you!

Programmer

?

Love

Creativity

?

Hate

repetitive

work?

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

FIGURE I.1  Algorithm of this book.