Richard Bellman was the inventor of dynamic programming. In his 40-year academic career, Bellman published more than 600 papers and 40 books, and received thousands of citations to his work.
There is a nice tutorial here by Michael Trick that you may want to look at.
Here is the Excel file for the solution of the stagecoach problem. (I wrote this ages ago; it looks quite unsophisticated.)
Since there is no assignment in this chapter, in the last class I will distribute a set of problems and their solutions.