Efficient Programmer

OverView: “90% of the world’s data was generated in the last few years.” Due to the advent of new technologies, devices, and communication means like social networking sites, the amount of data produced by mankind is growing rapidly every year. The amount of data produced by us from the beginning of time till 2003 was 5 billion gigabytes. If you pile up the data in the form of disks it may fill an entire football field. The same amount was created in every two days in 2011, and in every ten minutes in 2013. This rate is still growing enormously. Though all this information produced is meaningful and can be useful when processed, it is being neglected. What is Big Data? Big Data is a collection of large datasets that cannot be processed using traditional computing techniques. It is not a single technique or a tool, rather it involves many areas of business and technology. Thus Big Data includes huge volume, high velocity and an extensible variety of data. The data in it will b...

Efficiency of an algorithm Programmers find a tough time writing efficient code. But what exactly do we mean by efficiency? What difference does it make if we write normal code instead of an efficient code? Let’s find out with a simple example of traditional sorting problem.      The first, known as insertion sort, takes time roughly equal to c1*n2 to sort n items, where c1 is a constant that does not depend on n. That is, it takes time roughly proportional to n2. The second, merge sort, takes time roughly equal to c2*n lg n, where lg n stands for log2 n and c2 is another constant that also does not depend on n. Insertion sort usually has a smaller constant factor than merge sort, so that c1 < c2. We shall see that the constant factors can be far less significant in the running time than the dependence on the input size n.     Where merge sort has a factor of lg n in its running time, insertion sort has a factor of n, which is much...