Customer Reviews

Classic Data Structures in Java

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It seems ironic that in a book about Data Structures, the book itself suffers from lack of clear structure, but that is exactly what is wrong with "Classic Data Structures in Java".

Unrelated topics are mixed together in the chapters (when I'm trying to learn about queues, why would I need eight pages mostly devoted to how to use Java's Abstract Windowing Toolkit?!). Similar subjects are spread willy-nilly across the book (As a quick example: I count 2 sorts introduced in chapter 4, 1 in chp6, 2 in chp7, 1 in chp14, 1 in chp15, and 2 in chp16...and there is no one table listing them all, comparing them all, and even the index doesn't mention quite a few of them.)

The back of the book claims "A clear seperation between the Abstract Data Type (interface) and the implementation is emphasized throughout the book". Well, after slogging through the huge sections of (error and typo-filled) Java Code in this book, with its various interfaces all trying to apply their various implementations...I must say I was thoroughly confused and didn't have much of a clue where the "implementation" began and the "interface" ended.

I would not recommend this book to anyone under any circumstances. Beginners will find themselves confused, more advanced readers will find it too simplistic, and, with the giant sections of Java code seperating most of the information, it's not even good for a reference manual.

While the author does make an attempt to be clear, I think sometimes he talks himself around the direct point. This book ends up being confusing and long winded at times. Object-Oriented Data Structures Using Java, is a much more clear and concise book on the same subject.

While the book does cover several basic concepts it does not spend enought time on algorithms. Many of the code examples contain error and are poorly written. If you need a datastructures/algorithms book you would be much better off with algorithms in c++ by sedgewick.

The author does a good job of describing data structures in Java but unfortunately less than one half of the code examples work after downloading it from his Web site (most of it works after modification - done on a Windows 2000 box).

The author does a good job describing algorithms and tools to use. However, after downloading the code from his web site and compiling the source code, less than one half of it worked on a Windows 2000 box without modification + two class files can't be re-created because of missing source code (Excellent book for learning algorithms and code debugging).