Not enough examples, clear explanations

Reviewed by whatever, 2009-11-06

Between a really bad professor and a really bad textbook, I'm not learning anything about data structures. This book has weird examples and not enough of them, and the book really doesn't explain just about anything well. I'm not too sure what else to say about it, if you are about to take a data structures class that requires this book, I think you'll want to get some supplemental materials (especially if your professor sucks as bad as mine).

Rich in contents, poor in implementations

Reviewed by Renato Perini, 2004-10-06

This book is divided in 10 chapters for a total of about 600 pages.
Part about fundamentals give some description of complexity analisys and performance monitoring. Some sorting algorithms and some basic search algorithms are presented here. This section is not so exhaustive, still useful. It contains descriptions on how to abstract data types.
Part about array and structures explains how aggregate data types can be used to build more complex data types and teach how to manipulate them.
This section is not very useful and it is not projected in a "production environment". Things are explained in a too semplicistic way and don't fit real world data structure construction. This is the sensation you will have all over the book. Data structures explained in this book works only with integers number. In a real world you will not build data structures to store integers only. This approach simplify greatly source code and comprehension on how a particular data structure WORKS, but will not give you a good vision on how a real data structure should be PROGRAMMED. So this book remains more academic than practical. For theoretical explanations about data structures there are more exhaustive books around, like "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest.
The material presented in this book is complete and updated and surely this is a great reference.Explanations are well given.
So consider five star if you buy this book for understanding how data structures work, only three star if you need this book to have some implementations to look at. Not bad but implementations could have been written in a more robust way.

Excellent Overall - Great content!

Reviewed by Ted, 2003-08-10

This book has an amazing amount of content. Very few data structures books contain quite as many structures as this one; In addition to containing all the common data structures one usually studies, people can also study Splay Trees, Compressed Tries, Patricia, Fibonacci Heaps...really the list keeps going. The only things that it seems to be missing are skip lists and multidimensional range trees...

Most data structures have rigorous (college-level-worthy) proofs for complexity and performance. These proofs are typically required of a student in a graduate level course, and thus, this book could be used for a graduate-level text. Because of this however, some may find this book a little daunting, especially if you just need an introduction to the topic.

The C++ code samples use templates so that the data structures can be generalized and used for any type. Therefore, the C++ code is very reusable. However, the code can sometimes be a bit hard to understand, mostly due to short variable names, and poor in-code comments. This is one of the reasons I didn't give this book 5 stars. Overall though, this book stands out in the crowd.

A Book that covers almost all fundamental Data Structures

Reviewed by Musleh-ud-din Mufti, 2001-05-21

An excellent book for a student who has a fundamental knowledge of programming in C/C++ and Mathematics as well. The font of printing needs to be enlarged a little bit.

Just overall difficult to go through

Reviewed by Anonymous, 2000-11-03

This book gets way too caught up in mathematical terminology and offers too few actual code examples. Most of the code examples consist of showing the format of the class they want you to write with comments telling you what the code would do if they actually had any in there. Granted the authors are dealing with concepts in the book, but I always find it easier to grasp a concept with full working examples to tear apart.

Aside from that, the book is extremely dry and difficult to read because the text is so boring. It's worse than reading a text on mathematics.

Speaking of mathematics, this book will totally swamp anyone who doesn't have a strong algebra background. The authors assume that the reader uses fairly complex algebraic equations regularly. I'm pretty good with algebra, but a little out of practice since I've been concentrating on my job and learning C++. I find myself spending almost as much time figuring out what their equations mean as I do learning the concepts they're trying to describe.

I would not recommend this book to anyone.