Customer Reviews

Algorithms, Data Structures, and Problem Solving With C++

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I just finished a semester at the University of Texas at Austin in which this book was the text book for an abstract data types class. The book is a good textbook, but not a good desk reference.

The book is obviously written with students in mind, using rhetorical questions, leaving vital areas unexplained as "exercises for the reader", etc. As an introductory text, in an introductory class, the book served its purpose, though the professor was required to explain some of the details that the book lacked. The code that is included in the book is all written in pseudo-code, most of it does not compile without some tweaking, and when a student is trying to grasp a diffucult concept in graph theory, the last thing that student wants is to have to trace through the program, line-by-line, to catch some error that is irrelevant to the larger problem, such as semicolons that have been left out, unmatched parenthesis, variable names that are not allowed by most of the commercial compilers.

The book does have a good learning curve, however, and makes for good reading when first approaching a new computer science concept; however, when having to program a particularly hard section of a certain data structure, wading through pages of diatribe against older methods is not what is needed at that time.

For instance, after spending a large portion of an entire chapter on AVL trees, Weiss proceeds to give example code (that doesn't compile on Borland 5.0, Visual C++, or GNU compilers without some tweaking), but leaves out a crucial method! When first learning about AVL trees, one of the lessons that was drilled into our heads was the diffuculty of AVL deletion... yet the book summed it up in *one* sentence: "As with most data structures, deletion is the hardest task; it is left as an exercise to the reader."

Argh.

This book is very thorough, but thats really all I can tell you about it's content, because the material (both the algorithm analysis and the data structures material), is presented in such a way as that the author expects you to already have a basic understanding of these concepts. Worst yet, the author's code is extremely poorly documented. Stay away from this book if you are new to advanced data types or algorithm analysis.

Tries to cover all topics but leaves many details that are needed by a beginner. Examples of code are difficult to comprehend.

This book should be on every C++ programmers list. Of all the books I've read on Data Structures and Algorithms using the C++ language this is the most comprehensive. This book also built my knowledge on the C++ language. I look forward to reading more books by this author.