Excellent for Mathematicians

This book demonstrates the growing divide between mathematics and computer science. Yes, mathematics are vital to the understanding and practice of any science. Yes, computer science is closer to physics than biology or chemistry when it comes to math usage. However, this does not make every aspiring computer scientist a mathematician. Given this book's steep mathematical requirements (discrete math, graph theory, combinatorics, and matrices), it's lack of explanations / demonstrations, and, from my experience, it's use in computer science courses without a steep math pre-requisite this book is inappropriately titled and difficult to use. If you already know the math and just want to apply it, then this book will be of tremendous use to you. If you don't know the math and think you'll learn what you need as you go along, then you'd better have a mathematician handy to help you out with that, because this book will leave you hanging.

if you attend MIT or another school with a HEAVY math emphasis, then this book will serve you well. If you've had nothing but Calculus, then this book may leave you enraged and confused with a strong preference for heuristics.

As it stands I hope the third edition is much improved, for the sake of students everywhere, and I wonder why my class (fall 2009) did not use it instead.

Other Reviews

• Good, but overrated
• THE Algorithms Book
• Authoritative book for algorithms
• Good quality, surprising speed
• Excellent for Mathematicians