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I didn’t appreciate this book until after I was finished with my class and had moved on to upper level programing classes at my University. I had an excellent teacher for the class and just never read the book. Now, in my new class, which we are using c++, we are working with more complicated and in depth use of the same concepts and algorithms that are in this book. I was rusty on working with it so I searched a gazillion books and all over the web and was still confused about what I needed to do my project before I remembered that I had it before in java and grabbed this book off my shelf. I was amazed at how amazingly precise and well defined each algorithm and code was after search for a solution all day. It teaches you HOW to program these concepts, not just give you the code. Shows you how to think about the problems. Very very good book.

Those who think this book has too much psuedocode are most likely to be fairly new to programming and don’t understand the syntax and how to piece things together as well as they might need; plus I don’t recall ever enjoying learning any concepts with Java. The psuedocode in this book pretty much tells you exactly how to program the topic, and even more importantly, shows you exactly what is happening. Psuedocode can be difficult to visualize when you are new to programming, this is true, but with more a little experience, I find this book invaluable. The book is about programming concepts explained using Java, it is not a java book.
Rating: 5 / 5

This book works from a Java standpoint, but it has little code. Some of the previous reviews tore it apart because of that, but I think the aim of this book focuses primarily on teaching the fundamentals on a more abstract or theoretical level. I don’t blame the author because some of the topics are not as easy to explain on paper as folks would like. In my case, we were assigned chapters for reading and then our professor would discuss them more thoroughly in class. Overall, I think this is a very good and helpful book, and also serves as a decent reference after you’ve used it for class. My only complaint is it is not completely easy to follow, and that is because the topics discussed are not that simple in nature.

Overall, this book does a good job of topics such as linked lists (doubly linked, tail recursive, etc.), algorithms (and analysis, big Oh), stacks, queues, etc. Once you get to Trees, Binary Trees, this book fails miserably. No matter how many times you read and re-read the tree sections, you’ll still be scratching your head with a clueless look on your face.
Rating: 3 / 5

This is a horrible book

I dont have much more to add than what the previous two reviewers did.

Too much pseudo code — and even the pseudo code is not all in one place.

Its all over the pages in the chapter making it very hard to understand what is going on with each class. Very dry, convoluted style of writing – tedious, repetitive. The organization of the chapters is poor at best.

All in all, really poorly written book. Its a shame this text was chosen at my school because I believe there are several great data structures books out there.
Rating: 1 / 5