What's Next?
What to Explore Next
More Graph Algorithms
- A Search* — Dijkstra with a heuristic. Used for pathfinding in games and maps. Requires an admissible heuristic.
- Floyd-Warshall — All-pairs shortest paths in O(V³). Great for dense graphs or when you need distances between all pairs.
- Tarjan's SCC — Strongly Connected Components in a single DFS pass. More efficient than Kosaraju's.
- Network Flow — Edmonds-Karp (BFS-based Ford-Fulkerson) for max flow / min cut problems.
- Articulation Points & Bridges — Find critical infrastructure nodes/edges in a network.
Applications
- Word Ladder — BFS on a graph where words are nodes and edges connect words differing by one letter.
- Course Schedule — LeetCode 207/210: topological sort with cycle detection.
- Number of Islands — DFS/BFS on a 2D grid graph.
- Alien Dictionary — Topological sort from character ordering constraints.
Tools & Libraries
- NetworkX — The Python graph library. Implements hundreds of algorithms, visualizes graphs, handles massive networks.
- igraph — Fast graph analysis for Python and R.
- Gephi — Graph visualization and exploration tool.
- Neo4j — Graph database for storing and querying graph-structured data with Cypher query language.
Further Reading
- Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) — Chapters 22-25 cover all graph algorithms in depth.
- Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena — Practical graph algorithms with real-world applications.
- CP-algorithms.com — Detailed explanations with implementations for competitive programming.
- LeetCode Graph Problems — 200+ practice problems from easy to hard.