A tale of programming and software best practices from the Computational Fairy Tales universe. In all his years as a wizard, Marcus has never seen a spell cause this much damage. When Hannaldous's sloppy attempt at a shield spell accidentally curses the castle, the walls start crumbling at an alarming rate. Now Marcus and his apprentice Shelly must figure out how to repair the damage before the castle turns to dust. Along the way they will encounter gossiping worms, perfectionist bakers, opportunistic rabbits, and copious amounts of mold. The Best Practices of Spell Design introduces...

Meet Frank Runtime. Disgraced ex-detective. Hard-boiled private eye. Search expert.

When a robbery hits police headquarters, it's up to Frank Runtime and his extensive search skills to catch the culprits. In this detective story, you'll learn how to use algorithmic tools to solve the case. Runtime scours smugglers' boats with binary search, tails spies with a search tree, escapes a prison with depth-first search, and picks locks with priority queues. Joined by know-it-all rookie Officer Notation and inept tag-along Socks, he follows a series of leads in a best-first search that unravels a...