[.ca] Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented ... (ISBN 0471346136)

Clear and Concise Text on Data Structures and Algorithms:
When I was taking a second-year "Data Structures and Algorithms" course in Engineering, I used this book as my main reference (instead of the course-designated text by Mark Allen Weiss). I must say I am pleasantly surprised by the clarity and conciseness of Bruno Preiss' writing style. The definitions in this book are more mathematically oriented, which makes it an ideal academic text. The organization of the book is also superior. Each chapter flows very well to the next, building on top of the previous knowledge learned. A good textbook should effectively minimize the study time and effort on the students' part, while maximizing the acquired knowledge. This text achieves just that. It is a delightful read, and even now when I am at the graduate level, I still return to it whenever I need a quick recap of data structures (trees, heaps, graphs, etc.) and algorithms (sorting, dynamic programming, greedy, hashing, etc.). A minor complaint I have for this book is probably that it does not include a chapter on P versus NP (this oberservation is based on the C++ equivalent of this book). But overall, this is an excellent (possibly the best) introductory text on the subject, and would serve as an ideal stepping stone to the more advanced book "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.

decent for soft eng, bad for data structures:
As a second year student, the use of design patterns (see chapter 5) bothers me. It really detracts from what the author is trying to convey. It's extremely hard to ignore them because you have to backtrack to previous chapters frequently which creates more confusion. This book may be useful to learn the basics of software engineering. But given complexity of the design patterns in this book, it could be glossed over in one lecture. ...

Not so much in quality:
I know this book is used as a textbook in some computer engineering courses at my school. However, I do not belong to engineering, but I am a computer science undergraduate. :-) I've tried to help my friends who were having a lot of trouble implementing a binary tree. So to follow what they learned, I've looked at the book. Hmm. I sat there, and said "I'm lucky that my profs don't teach me algorithms like this." Some implementations did not make quite intuitive sense to me. Although I understood what the book was trying to illustrate, but I didn't see why such implementation would be intuitive and useful.

I used this book at school:
Hi, as an undergrad engineering student, I had this book for the coursebook in my algorithms course. Honestly speaking, it's good , very readable text. I never used any of the code examples fom the book in my assignments, yet they proved rather helpfull in understanding the material. Something, that I think is missing from this book is the answeres to the problems at the end of the chapter that are not programming projects. Ading them to the book could help students a lot ( no need to relay on TA's )

Don't believe these other reviews...:
Some people are reviewing this book as hard to read, confusing, and complaining that the code doesn't compile. Such is the state of higher education these days...I would actually say that this is a very readable introductory treatment on data structures. Granted, there seems to be the occasional error in implementing classes that strictly conform to given definitions, and some of the implementations seem a bit simplistic, but overall its a fine piece of work. I found the implementations for tree traversals in chapter 9 to be rather clever. There is something of a reliance upon a hierarchy structure (introduced in ch. 5) which i think might turn some people off in using this book as a text. Chapters seem to build upon previous chapters, requiring you to read most of the book. Professors have a tendency to skip around to fit the curricula into the time of the class term which might make the book seem confusing--i've just been reading it straight through for personal amusement so i'm not as influenced by this. I think this class hierarchy is justified because the book isn't just about data structures, its also about design patterns. If you know something about either data structures or design patterns you can gain insight into both from reading this. And as for compiling the code...the purpose of books like this shouldn't be to copy and paste code. If you have even a vague understanding of the material "filling in the blanks" and writing your own code should be a simple matter.