Customer Reviews

C++ Plus Data Structures

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I've been in college as teacher and student for almost 40 years, and this is one of the most soul-destroying textbooks in any field I have studied.

When introducing fundamentals, the authors often express themselves poorly and try to compensate through repetition and paraphrase. This confuses the student fresh to the material, since it is not clear whether the same point is being repeated, or developed, or a new one introduced. On the other hand, they simply skirt concepts--exception handling, for example--that need to be explained in detail. Instead of straightforwardly presenting new material, they tiptoe around it through constructs of their own design which are no more easy to learn and whose relation to the essential point is unclear. For example, something like myNode->next->back refers to the node pointed to by the back pointer of the node following myNode, i.e. to myNode itself. Not too mind-boggling. But first they have to lead us through a song and dance about a notation they invented which represents the preceding as back(next(myNode)), which is (a) unnecessary, (b) more complex, and (c) really confusing because (a) it is exactly backwards, and (b) the most deeply nested item is one that dominates the structure. The whole book is like this, a weird combination of aimlessness with a hidden agenda, expressed in patronizing, humorless, finger-wagging.

Other reviewers call it a good reference work; it is not. It is poorly indexed, partly because the explanation of a single concept may appear at intervals through several chapters of context which, though rambling, is a necessary to grasp the meaning.

Note that the enthusiastic reviews of this book come from a software reviewer, someone who finds this the clearest of the _three_ data structure books he's used, and someone who recommends it to advanced programmers, granting that you have to understand C++ classes to follow the book--although the book's task is to _introduce_ C++ classes. Another says that all previous courses just taught C++ coding--but this is a second-semester text! In other words, it's a great book to own if you don't need it.

I think teachers who like this book don't actually read it, just flip through it, checking points, "Lists, yup, linked lists, yup, doubly-linked lists, with circles and arrows on the back, yup, yup, yup, it's all there," because THEY DON'T HAVE TO LEARN ANYTHING FROM IT. I can't see how any teacher could adopt it who tried to read it from the point of view of someone new to the material presented.

I must state that any of Nell Dale's books that I have used I have found very poorly written and organized. The problems can be hard to understand, let alone trying to answer them. It goes into excessive detail when little is needed. I must say that ANY student required to use this book better be prepared for a hard class...because this book will be the bane of your existance until you can safely get rid of it.

This book is one of the worse text books, I've ever owned. The text in itself is relatively confusing. The book is lengthy, though this might be a good thing, it's lengthy in all the wrong ways. First off, the author spends more time making jokes and using point-less examples to describe a concept. Then, the author proceeds to use not-even-pseudo-code to explain concepts. Then, lastly, the code is presented, but it is not documented properly which makes it harder to trace, especially if you're a beginning data structures student (which I am). The one thing that nags me about this book is the authors use of a stack-implementation in the hash tables (pushing the data to the back of the list) rather than a queue implementation (placing the data at the front of the list), which takes up less operations. Overall, this book is NOT a good thing to buy nor even own.

This is a terrible textbook on data structures.

The chapters are a meandering mess and are unpredictable. I've read several books on data structures, and this is the worst.

Some chapters are all theory and bad pseudocode, and other chapters (specifically the binary tree chapter) are mostly code with little meaningful explanation.

I've actually had a class with this book, and was forced to do the homework assignments from it--few of which had anything to do with the text. In order to learn anything useful, I ended up studying the homework exercises from another data structures textbook.

Oh, and expect this code to compile. Every week my teacher had to provide us with a revised version of the code to fix their bugs.

A complete waste of paper.

This book is touted as a "second-semester text" so I was expecting a nicely organized book with many examples of actual code that would help me transition to a deeper understanding of C++.After doing quite well in the introductory C++ course I was quite dissapointed when I began to read through this text.The first sin of this book is the lack of actual code. Yes, there are code examples in this book, but not many.The majority of this book is theoretical explanations of data structures.The second major problem is the chapter exercises are quite vague in explaining what they want the reader to accomplish. Overall this book has a "disorganized" feel with no framework to hold it together. This text is more of a "novel" of Data Structures rather than a "how to".If you need this book for a course than you will have to make do,but if you are getting this to simply further your study of C++ I would look elsewhere first.

This book is a great refrence book for data structure. The style might be confusing to some, but the structure and many examples are actually carefully written in most effective way. Reader must understand C++ class, otherwise the structure does not make sense. I read it for AP Com. Sci. exam and refered to it while in college. Recommend to all advance programmer.

I found this book easier to read among other data structures books like "Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in c++ by Mark Allen", "Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ by Adam Drozdek", "Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H.Cormen". This book has a lot of pictures that explain new concepts. Many data structures books only have few diagrams. Not only it is well written but also the design of diagrams and the color of pages are amazing. This book is clearly not for beginners who want to learn C++. For beginners i would recommend three books: Introduction to Programming with C++ by Y. Daniel Liang, Programming and Problem Solving with C++: Comprehensive Edition by Nell Dale, or C++ Programming: From Problem Analysis to Program Design by D.S. Malik.

I think the complains about this book is not because its quality, but i think the reviewers who bought the book might not understand basic programming in c++. Trust me, Reading Data Structures books won't be pleasant, if don't have experience in programming with c++. There are of topics in c++ that you need to spend time learning, like classes, pointers, inheritance, polymorphism, templates, vectors and basic searching and sorting algorithms. Data Structures books don't focus on teaching c++ itself, but how to use c++ to organize data.

The only negative this about this book is its title "C++ plus Data Structures". it is a bit confusing. You would expect the book would teach you c++ and data structures. however, It only explains advance concepts of c++ and it is not intended for beginners.

Unlike other Data Structures books i have, this book is the only one i can understand with any struggling or looking for different resources. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Data Structures and especially for those who study on their own. This book doesn't bore you with complex math analysis instead complex ideas are explained through examples. If you are really interested in proofs and mathematical analysis buy Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H.Cormen.

In conclusion, If you have moderate skills in c++ this book will take you to the next level with ease.

Typically most students that take Data Structures are neither lazy nor stupid. This may be considered to be a good book if the person using it already knows the language and has good understanding of the principles used within the book. As a course book for people that are attempting to learn, this book has very little to offer. Sadly, I am in a class that requires this book. Everyone in the class is complaining about this book and even the teacher is having second thoughts about using it again. Probably the main problem is the cryptic code snippets included.

Please understand these are not the comments of a bitter student, but an A one, and a good programmer too.

If you liked Dale's first book, "Programming and Problem Solving with C++", I believe you will be deeply disappointed with this one. Maybe the difference is in the Co-Authors? While "Programming and Problem Solving with C++" is clear and concise learning tool with great examples, I have found C++ Plus Data Structures to be difficult to read and full of errors. The examples in this book are somewhat descent but have been ruined by constant errors. I have since read other books that give much better perspective. If you read this book during a second semester course, you are sure to leave still wondering to yourself "what the heck is a template".

I just got complained about not following this textbook in the course of "Data structure". In the first six weeks of this semester, I have to stuff the students with supplementary materials about how to define a class, how to use a class in a program, what is the relatioship between class and object, what is the hell "abstract data type" thing to do with class, why use private access control while we want to know something. All these things are not supposed to cover in a semester for this course, I guess. However, most of my students have only "heard of" class and "public, private, protected", etc, which they had in their CS1/CS2 courses. After the first homework to learn how to define a class and use it a program, we are hoping we can go straightly with the five sructures. But surprisely from chapter 3, I found that I am preparing a "System Analysis and Design" class or maybe a "Software Engineering" class.

Sometime, I got stuck on the black-board, because I suddenly realized that the codes I just wrote down on the black-board contains infinite loop. For instance, this one on page150 in the third edition, quote:
"Examine this algorithm carefully and convince yourself that it is correct. Try cases where you are deleting the first item and the last item.
void SortedType::DeleteItem(ItemType item) {
int location = 0;
while(item.ComparedTo(info[location]) != EQUAL)
location++;
for(int index = location+1; index<length; index++)
info[index-1] = info[index];
length--;
}
"
I am just wondering whether the authors have tried themselves to see what if this code is used to delete an item NOT in the list at all, and what if the list is thought to be empty but the item at the first slot of the array is coincide with "item"? Erros like these exist many places.

I personally dislike the textbook mostly because of its style. The authors use the same methodology in wrting the textbook for "Computer Science Illuminated", in which a lot of things are menioned but not detailed, and a (coding, logical, and presenting) style is not kept and changed without smooth transition for the treating similar things. This is especially the case in the chapters of Chapter 5, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8" when dealing with recurssively implementions of those structures.