The world-wide Sudoku craze is starting to ebb off - unfortunately, Mr. Lee’s book has been laying around in our labs for quite some time. So far so good: is it still worth buying?
Programming Sudoku is divided into seven chapters. The first looks at the rules of the game and can serve as an excellent introduction to the game for beginners and people who never cared about Sudoku puzzles(e.g. yours truly).
The second chapter looks at Visual Basic.NET and at designing applications for Windows. A nice load of basics are transported in the process: people who can program in C or VB6 will be able to pick the ball with ease.
The next three chapters look at various algorithmic tricks that can be used to tackle Sudoku puzzles. Even though Sudoku itself is straightforward, solving “difficult” puzzles can require extremely sophisticated and interesting algorithms…
Chapter six is especially interesting: it looks at methods for generating puzzles. Toppling around solving algorithms generally is a very interesting approach: this tome takes it to the max.
Finally, an appendix looks at a soduku derivative called Kakuro…
Wei-Meng Lee did an excellent job clarifying key concepts. The sample code is easy to understand, images are deployed wherever they are useful:
In the end, Programming Sudoku is an excellent read for people who feel like reading up on methods for solving puzzles with a PC. The methods learned here probably can be applied to other games easily… However, the book has an additional positive effect: it serves as a quick introduction into Visual Basic.NET. If you currently develop Palm apps and plan to move over to .NET CF, getting this book will pay out. As for the price: at 17$@Amazon’s , it’s a total bargain!
