Additional Materials Help Center Learn more.

If you are really curious about one of the topics covered in the class and would like to know more, this list provides some additional materials that expand your knowledge. The course is designed to be self contained and none of these resources are mandatory. They are best used for getting a deeper understanding of the course material after you have exhausted the lectures.

Texts on Algorithms

• Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein
• Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne (free online)
• Algorithms by Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou, Umesh Vazirani

Texts on Constraint Programming

• Programming with Constraints: An Introduction by Kimbal Marriott, Peter Stuckey
• Handbook of Constraint Programming edited by Francesca Rossi, Peter van Beek, Toby Walsh
• The OPL Optimization Programming Language by Pascal Van Hentenryck

Review the staff announcements forum for discounts on these texts, exclusively for Coursera students.

Texts on Local Search

• Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization edited by Emile Aarts, Jan Karel Lenstra
• Handbook of Metaheuristics (International Series in Operations Research & Management Science) edited by Michel Gendreau, Jean-Yves Potvin
• Constraint-Based Local Search by Pascal van Van Hentenryck, Laurent Michel

Texts on Linear and Integer Programming

• Integer Programming by Laurence A. Wolsey
• Integer and Combinatorial Optimization by Laurence A. Wolsey, George L. Nemhauser
• Large Scale Linear and Integer Optimization: A Unified Approach by Richard Kipp Martin
• Introduction to Linear Optimization by Dimitris Bertsimas, John N. Tsitsiklis
• Understanding and Using Linear Programming by Jiri Matousek, Bernd Gärtner
• Theory of Linear and Integer Programming by Alexander Schrijver

Other

• In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation by William J. Cook
• TSP Art

Optimization in Pop-culture

• XKCD - Travelling Salesman Problem
• XKCD - NP-Complete
• XKCD - Recipes
• Travelling Salesman Movie
• Final Olympic Results - Winter 2010
• The Problem of the Traveling Politician by William J. Cook
• Mario is hard
• Lemmings is hard
• Candy Crush is hard

Problem Libraries

• CSPLib
• MIPLIB
• PrefLib
• TSPLIB