Online Course Materials

This page provides access to online lectures, lecture slides, and assignments for use in teaching and learning from the book An Introduction to the Analysis of Algorithms. It is appropriate for use by instructors as the basis for a "flipped" class on the subject, or for self-study by individuals.

Flipped class.

If you are an an instructor teaching the analysis of algorithms, please send an e-mail to get an access code to make the videos freely available to your students. An effective way for you to teach the material in a typical college class is to adhere to a weekly cadence, as follows:

Each week, send an e-mail note to all students in the class that briefly describes assignments for that week (lectures, reading, and problem sets). The e-mails used in the most recent offering at Princeton are accessible in the table below; please feel free to edit them and use them in your own class.
Students watch the lectures at their own pace, do the reading and work on the problem sets (each lecture ends with a few suggestions for assignments, which instructors typically tailor to their own needs).
Occasional "class meetings" may be scheduled for discussion of the material, reviews for exams, informal interaction with students, and any enrichment material you may wish to cover. [Note: The value of online meetings during the pandemic is debatable. Our students prefer that we spend our time providing personalized feedback on assignments and answering questions via discussion groups and e-mail. ]

Important note: A common mistake in teaching a flipped class is to add too much enrichment material. Our experience is that time in class meetings is much better spent preparing students for success on problem sets and exams. If an instructor makes it clear that the best way to prepare for exams is to watch the lectures and do the reading, most students will do so. Class meetings then can involve interacting with students and with the material in such a way as to reinforce understanding. For example, working with potential exam questions is an excellent activity. You can find some examples at the end of each section on this booksite.

Self-study.

An effective way to learn the material on your own is to play the lectures on some regular schedule, do the associated reading, and attempt to solve some of the assigned exercises on your own. If you get stuck on a particular exercise, find some others in the book or on this website, or try to solve some of the problems given in the lectures without looking at the solutions there. In the future, we plan to add more exercises with solutions to this booksite, but that is work in progress.

While some of the reading material may be difficult for a typical undergraduate to master on such a quick pass through, a substantial fraction of the coverage is elementary, and the lectures provide a firm basis for understanding the key concepts.

Princeton students.

At Princeton, we use these materials to teach the first half of our senior-level undergraduate course An Introduction to Analytic Combinatorics (the second half of the course is on the Analytic Combinatorics booksite). Click on the COS 488 tab on the sidebar for logistical details. We update the material as the semester progresses. You can look ahead in the table below to get an idea of what is to come, but assignments are not "official" until you receive them by e-mail.