[nucleardog]

> As for the actual Ikea-style instruction pamphlet... I suspect that making it was very helpful for the author. But I don't think the result would have helped me as a novice.

I have no formal CS background or education at all, but have been working in IT for... over 20 years now?

So I'm not a "novice" in one sense, but in another my education on "algorithms" is pretty light and mostly through osmosis. Quicksort specifically is something where I've looked at the Wikipedia article on a number of times to understand but never managed to grasp.

The diagram made it click for me pretty much immediately. Yesterday if you asked me to implement a quicksort I wouldn't have had any idea where to begin, today I can say pretty confidently that I could implement something that would give you back a sorted list.

I'm probably an outlier here--minimal algorithms background, but an intuitive comfort with things like recursion--but at least some anecdotal evidence that it _may_ be useful to a novice!

[ksenzee]

If you’re an outlier, I’m out there with you: I’ve also been writing software professionally for 20 years, I have no CS degree, and I’m not fool enough to reimplement algorithms like quicksort that are sitting right there in stdlib. I similarly found this explanation a lot more useful than anything else I have read about quicksort, and I’m confident I could implement it now, but couldn’t have before I read this.

[photon_lines]

If you guys like visual-explanations that are a bit more intuitive -- I put actually made guides on both data-structures and algorithms not too long ago which you can find here:

Visual-Focused Algorithms Cheat Sheet — https://photonlines.substack.com/p/visual-focused-algorithms...

Visual Data Structures Cheat Sheet — https://photonlines.substack.com/p/visual-data-structures-ch...

[yifanl]

The Fenwick tree in your cheat sheet seems a little broken

[photon_lines]

Can you go into a little more detail? What is broken exactly?

[yifanl]

The visual is extremely hard to understand how it relates to the description, given that it looks to be 1-indexed, but the description only makes sense for 0-indexing (4th element stores the sum of the first 4 elements), not to mention none of the binary indexes seem to be storing the correct sums (or they're storing sums of a tree that isn't being presented).

[photon_lines]

The visual is directly from here (I recommend you give it a read if you want to grasp the full intuition on how a Fenwick tree works (page 97)): https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf

I should have included the full visuals which are included there and I can see your point on why people would get confused by that visual - so I'll make a note to include the full image when I have more time. Thank you for the feedback.