Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of data structures (Computer software engineering series)

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It was the main textbook in one of my CS courses and I thought it was great. In fact, over the years, just about every company I've worked has had a copy lying around for reference. I think that says a lot.

This is a classic, I had this in my BS and ever after. Though a bit cryptic in the beginning but as you read on you start getting the grip on the subject. I have kept this for over 8 years now and always keep going back to it.

The Key to read it is to have patience.

This book was the prescribed textbook for my data structures course. Reading it, however, was a very unpleasant experience. I found most of the discussions long, digressive and pedantic and of a nature that made you wonder after reading two pages what it was that the author started out to say in the first place. However, one plus point is that the algorithms are written in a simple enough pseudocode, and not in C or Pascal. But even so, the algorithms tend to be like the text - too notation-intensive and very difficult to follow. For example, the author, pedantically, wants to write an iterative version of the Inorder tree traversal algorithm - and succeeds after 3 ugly tries. A display that is hardly useful or enjoyable, especially for the beginning student. More mentally exhausting and undecipherable algorithms are found in the chapter on internal sorting. The level of the exercises is way too high, especially since the text does not cover fundamentals well. My advice to people starting to learn data structures would be to stay away from this book. I sincerely hope that there are other books that one can learn data structures from.