Pattern132 is an interesting problem I've seen floating around on various message boards. It is a constraint satisfaction problem that I've seen all manner of solutions for ranging from dynamic programming, to straight brute force iteration. When I fir

Functional Programming with Java

Early in my career, I had a lead developer on a project who during code review, much to my chagrin, kept making me re-write what was in my opinion “perfectly good, working code”. To my lead however

Unique Collections

 Knowing that a collection is comprised of unique only items if a very useful thing indeed. It's so useful that this concept is the basis of one of the fundamental data structure: the Set. While this is not the on

Ahh, Heaps. 

Heaps are one of those data structures that turn up everywhere. They serve a humble purpose: find the maximum value (depending on if you're using min or max ordering) of a set efficiently. It is this very purpose that imbues