Excellent on the basics and coding style, superficial on advanced or unusual subjects

If you are a self-taught programmer who has never taken a class in data structures and algorithms, or has done so but not really got it, this book could be a good read. It presents in a gentle, very tutorial-like, example-driven fashion the basics of this field, Lists, Sets, Maps, Trees, Hashing, Sorting & Searching and a little material on more unusual topics like String searching and matching and computational geometry. This last part however does not maintain the very good standards of the first part of the book. The treatment is too superficial and vague and little mistakes and confusion starts to creep in. The main body of the book anyways is really well written and clear. As an bonus, the authors use a test driven approach to developing their Java code giving you a chance to appreciate this very useful practice of extreme programmming and agile methodologies. The code itself is crystal clear and shows the principles of good coding and refactoring (other pillars of extreme programming): short reusable functions, few local variables and meaningful names.
The end result is so good that the "how it works" sections who are meant to explain the code are almost always unnecessary.
So this book can also be useful in teaching you how to write in a clear and elegant style. Final words, if you are looking for something that will introduce you to mathematical analysis of algorithms and their efficiency look elsewhere as this title contains none of that.

Other Reviews

• Excellent for what it is
• More of a book on testing algorithms in Java than producing them
• An unnecessary blend of topics
• Excellent on the basics and coding style, superficial on advanced or unusual subjects