A few questions have come up about various ways to do operations - from sorting, removing duplicates, comparing,
finding roots.

ALL of this stuff is covered in D. E. Knuth's 'Art of Computer Programming' - the father of metafont (TrueType is based on this)
Most decent libraries have a copy, all college libraries do.
It's still so popular that Amazon ships it overnight.

Also, 'Numerical Recipes in C' is still out there. Good book.