Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms (Progress in Theoretical Computer Science)

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If you have cut your teeth on Donald Knuth's classic three volumes, "The Art of Computer Programming", and you want more detail, at a similar level of complexity, then consider Storer's book.

It delves into lists, recursion, trees, graphs, heaps and sets. Like Knuth, Storer thoughtfully supplies an extensive list of questions at the end of each chapter that will greatly deepen your appreciation of the field if you tackle them. Ok, he doesn't give answers, but think of that as greater incentive on your part to solve them. There are almost 400 questions in the book.

The teaching style is similar to Knuth, in that it has all the rigour needed by an algorithm designer like yourself, without drowning you in epsilon-delta ultra rigour like a pure maths text.

Note that the only code fragments are in pseudocode. This should not be a problem for you. I am assuming you are experienced enough that what you need is understanding of an algorithm, and that manually converting it to code is straightforward and a purely secondary issue.

The take home message is that this is excellent for anyone doing serious programming.

I selected this book as the textbook for my course of data structure, and this book has given me a lot of troubles. Firstly, the pseudo code give by the book is sometimes wrong and the descriptions about the data structures are inconsistent. For example, if you have this book, turn to the page containing the merge sort pseudo code and give it a try. As another example, go to the tree section and have a detailed look at descriptions of the delete-min operations of a binary search tree, you will find the defects by yourself. Secondly, the language the author used are not reader-friendly, especially not beginner friendly. To some extent, it scared away my students. They kept telling me that "this book is difficult to read". I should have selected another book on data structure.