Data Structures Using C and C++ (2nd Edition)

The book covers a good amount of material and as the preface of the book states it is meant for a 2 semester course in data structures. The book covers stacks, recursion, queues, list, binary trees, sorting, searching, hashing, graphs, etc... All that is essential to becoming a well founded programmer. There are exercises at the end of each chapter to reinforce the material. The material presented is theoretical in nature not much C/C++ code but that's fine.

My opinion of this book has changed over the last year. I had to purchase the book for my first data structures class in college. After reading just the first chapter I was bewildered and confused! Most of the students agreed with me that it was a confusing book and without the benefit of an excellent instructor we'd surely would've been lost. I cannot stress this enough, unless you are very smart student this book should be a supplement to lecture material. I personally didn't read the chapters until after lecture and it usual for me read material before class.

But now a year after I first opened the book I find it a truly great reference. Certainly the book has grown on me and maybe later I'd probably give it a five. For example, recently I had to write a threaded example for my Windows programming class and I wanted to something time consuming yet simple that actually did something, so I just referred to the book on the fibonacci sequence using recursion and used that.

My final thoughts about this book are a bit strange. First off, this is the only data structures book I have read (so far) therefore my opinion lacks some perspective. At first I didn't like it but as time has passed I find that I really like the book. If you are a student going into a data structures class, most likely you'll be required to get a book on data structures and it's possible that you won't get assigned this book. But I would recommend it after you take the class. If you do get it for your class, don't sell it back to the school! You may just find it useful in the future.

First of all, this is not introductory in the strict sense - you should be fairly good at C programming, but need not know data structures and algorithms. But it can be considered as an introduction to data structures and algorithms if you aren't a novice in C programming.

It is fairly light on maths and analysis of algorithm performance, which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your requirements. I read the C version of the book, which was quite OK, but i've read much better books since, and the C++ seems to have been added on for market appeal - i feel one should be wary of books which claim to be in ' C and C++ ' ......... make up your mind !!

What i'd suggest is, if you're happy with pseudocode that you can adapt to your needs and don't care for a particular language, go for 'Introduction to algorithms' by Cormen,Leiserson & Rivest.

If you want code in C, go for Sedgewick's 'Algorithms in C' - arguably as good Cormen et al's book on concepts, and 'K & R' class code, ie C code that will remind you of Kernighan & Ritchie's classic C textbook.

However, if you want C++, then Sedgewick's C++ version or Mark Allen Weiss's book might be a good choice.

To be fair, this is a reasonably good book, with the explanations being reasonably clear, but the breadth & depth simply don't compete with the books mentioned above. After all, if you can get great books, why settle for anything less ?