Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Java

Rating:
Summary: totally awful
Review: this book is awful!! most of the code from the book will not compile directly, especially in later chapters. a lot of the code is not even finished (like the section on AVL and Binary Search trees). way too much energy is spent on creating structures and classes that already exist within java, and the math used to gauge algorithm complexity is unnecessarily complex. not worth even $20...

Rating:
Summary: Clear and Concise Text on Data Structures and Algorithms
Review: When I was taking a second-year "Data Structures and Algorithms" course in Engineering, I used this book as my main reference (instead of the course-designated text by Mark Allen Weiss). As a critical reader, I tend to find faults in many texts that I have read before. However, I am pleasantly surprised by the clarity and conciseness of Bruno Preiss' writing style. The definitions in this book are more mathematically oriented, which makes it an ideal academic text. The organization of the book is also superior. Each chapter flows very well to the next, building on top of the previous knowledge learned. A good textbook should effectively minimize the study time and effort on the students' part, while maximizing the acquired knowledge. This text achieves just that. It is a delightful read, and even now when I am at the graduate level, I still return to it whenever I need a quick recap of data structures (trees, heaps, graphs, etc.) and algorithms (sorting, dynamic programming, greedy, hashing, etc.). A minor complaint I have for this book is probably that it does not include a chapter on P versus NP (this oberservation is based on the C++ equivalent of this book). But overall, this is an excellent (possibly the best) introductory text on the subject, and would serve as an ideal stepping stone to the more advanced book "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.