Sudoku Programming with C teaches you how to write computer programs to solve and generate
Sudoku puzzles. This is a practical book that will provide you with everything you need to
write your own books of Sudoku Classic and Samurai puzzles. But be warned: after reading it
you'll discover that the puzzles in your local paper are not so challenging after all! We like
Sudokus because they test our capacity to recognize and interpret patterns. But how are the
clues generated? Where do those quasi-symmetrical configurations come from? When the author
explored the Web to find out he discovered that there were many sites that explained how to
solve Sudokus but none that told him how create them. He also saw many sites and apps to play
Sudoku but perhaps not surprising no indication of how they worked. So he had to develop
his own applications in order to find out. And from the very start he decided that he would
publish the code for anyone else to use and perhaps tinker with but the author wrote it in
such a way that also lets readers with limited knowledge of programming techniques understand
it. In fact you could decide to start generating thousands of puzzles almost immediately and
go through the explanations of algorithms and techniques later a bit at a time. The author
chose to write the application in plain old C because he wanted to make the code accessible to
as many people as possible. In this book you will find an explanation of all solving
strategies and the code to implement them. Writing the Solver application was more difficult
than writing the Generator because it required designing and implementing each strategy
separately. However the author wanted to include a solving program capable of listing the
strategies necessary to solve any particular puzzle. He also wanted to check whether a puzzle
was solvable analytically without any guessing. This book includes the full listings of both
the Generator and the Solver and explanations of all C modules with walk-throughs and
examples.
