Customer Reviews

Data Structures and Algorithms in C++

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is one of the dozens of Data Structures and Algorithms books in the market and till now the worst I've ever seen. I have taken two DSA courses in my undergrad years, and now as a grad, I'm TAing that course.

The theoretical treatment of the book is superficial and too childish. Yet, there's too little practical value. They discuss the unnecessary linked list implementations of trees which is quite confusing for students. I am also amazed that they do not mention finding or removing an element in a BST. And, more importantly there's too little discussion of graphs.

I don't understand those professors trying to bog down students with useless details and complicated C++ codes. Rather, they should give the intuition and the theory behind the data structures and algorithms. Weiss' book is much better than this one. But, even that is obsessed with doing tricky things with C++.

Anyway, to sum up: This book is a garbage. Stay away unless it's required for the course you're taking in case you may need to do homeworks and such.

As a graduate student and a teacher's assistant to the Data Structures course at U of Iowa, I found this book to be a terrible choice, it has incomplete and very breif examples that just leave the students confused...and for future note, the following semester the text was changed...

This is a very frustrating book. The writing is horrible, there are no sample exercises in the book so when you go to do an assignment from the exercises, there is no example of how to approach the problem. There is a "hint database" on their online website that gives you one line of how to approach a problem, but even that is hit or miss and can make things even more confusing. In short, I didn't learn any more about data structures than I didn't already know from my previous courses.
If you are looking for a book that explains things in a much better format, look for the Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C++ by Weiss. It explains things so much better.
Don't waste your money on this, and if you have to buy it for a class, definitely buy used. I'm selling mine back to the school bookstore!!

Good concept but you can't get enough. It is very difficult to follow as the authors provides Code fragments. I don't think this is suitable for self-study.

This is honestly one of the worst if not the worst textbooks i have ever used. I am a computer science major at the University of Buffalo and was required to use this book for a course with the same name. This book is full of useless examples that demonstrate the easiest of concepts while there are huge holes in coverage of harder concepts in the book. The end of the chapter exercises are terrible and are not explained in the chapters preceding them. Stay away from this text.

I have only been using this book for about a month now, but I can say without a doubt that it is the absolute worst textbook I have ever seen. The authors are stingy with both examples and explanations. Another thing I don't like is that they have exercises but no solutions. Most textbooks will list solutions for odd-numbered problems, but not this one. What good is trying to solve the problems if you don't have any way of knowing if you're on the right track? There has to be a better textbook out there somewhere, 'cause this one really sucks!

I used this book to supplement to my coursebook that was required for my Data Structure class.

Pros:

I used this book more than my coursebook.
There are a lot of advanced topics for you to study.
The book starts with a very good introduction to C++ Language and moves on explaining objects, classes , inheritance and polymorphism in one chapter which is really good.

chapter 3 on Analysis book is very well written and clearly explain Big -O very clearly , in fact it has one of the best explanation compared to any other Data Structure book in the market.


The rest of the book is well organized with all important Data Structures.

This book has excellent explanation and has deep explanation on various subject which you will not find in any other Data Structure book.

cons:

The codes are not easy to read and understand if you have no experience in Data Structures.
I found many examples in the book very complicated.
The codes are not explained in a step by step fashion.

clearly not the best book for beginners in DS.


Overall i highly recommend this book for students who enjoy programming and want to learn more than what is discussed in the class.
Also it is a great book to increase your knowledge on Data Structures.

This book is extremely difficult to read. Nothing is explained well. Sentences are very wordy, and the authors use lots of random variables throughout the sentences. This book is intended for sophomore data structures classes, but this book does not explain concepts well for beginners.

While I think that the other reviewers might be a little too harsh on this book, it definitely leaves a lot to be desired. It is not written very well at all (confusing language and sentence structure) and skims over important topics while going into too much detail on pointless ones. There is still a lot that can be learned from this book, but I would recommend checking out the alternatives.

This book is very bad unless you have a good teacher to supplement. I used this book only to understand concepts that I wasn't clear on during the class lectures. In short, a horrible book if you want to self-teach but not too bad if you just want it as a supplement.