...The main objective of my book is to explore someideas that arebasic, interesting, and accessible, without attempting comprehensivetreatment. These objectives are stated clearly in the first paragraph of the book's preface. My intended audience are relative novices who need not have prior experience with algorithms, data structures, or linear algebra, and with only limited experience with C++. The book's intended audience is also clearly framed in my book's preface. Indeed, the objectives and target audience are also evident from the table of contents, which shows that the first half of the book is devoted to fundamentals (the design and analysis of algorithms, and basic data structures) that the typical graduate student, much less professional, would have mastered years earlier.
Are my references deficient because the papers it cites are no less than four years old (relative to the book's release date), and some even date to the 1970s? Most of the methods I present were devised years and even decades ago. I chose these methods to suit the book's purpose and audience; I chose methods that are basic, yet which a less sophisticated reader will find interesting and accessible. Similarly, I chose the book's references so they would be relevant to the book's content and useful to the reader.
The choice of what topics to present is always to some degree at the author's discretion, particularly in a book such as this which explores ideas without attempting comprehensive coverage. Critics can always be found who will take issue at the omission of this topic or the inclusion of that, or with how some topic is presented. But again, I chose the material with my book's objectives and audience in mind.
Relative to the expectations of a computational geometer or a graduate student, my book cannot compare to Preparata and Shamos', or to Mark deBerg's. Their audience doesn't require a book that spends half its time covering such fundamentals as algorithm analysis, lists and stacks, search trees, and elementary sorting and searching methods. Their audience would expect only the most limited coverage of these things, or no coverage at all. In contrast, given my book's target audience, to omit these topics would be to leave out the very background that the rest of the book not only requires, but that the intended reader likely lacks. Omitting such material would be a disservice to the intended reader. Likewise, to include certain more difficult topics which are the meat of these more advanced books would go well beyond the scope of my book, and to do this would also be a disservice to the intended reader. My book differs significantly from these other books in its objectives and its intended audience.
