Data Structures and Abstractions with Java

Needed the book for class. Got it in a timely manner. Was in perfect condition.

I didn't appreciate this book until after I was finished with my class and had moved on to upper level programing classes at my University. I had an excellent teacher for the class and just never read the book. Now, in my new class, which we are using c++, we are working with more complicated and in depth use of the same concepts and algorithms that are in this book. I was rusty on working with it so I searched a gazillion books and all over the web and was still confused about what I needed to do my project before I remembered that I had it before in java and grabbed this book off my shelf. I was amazed at how amazingly precise and well defined each algorithm and code was after search for a solution all day. It teaches you HOW to program these concepts, not just give you the code. Shows you how to think about the problems. Very very good book. Those who think this book has too much psuedocode are most likely to be fairly new to programming and don't understand the syntax and how to piece things together as well as they might need; plus I don't recall ever enjoying learning any concepts with Java. The psuedocode in this book pretty much tells you exactly how to program the topic, and even more importantly, shows you exactly what is happening. Psuedocode can be difficult to visualize when you are new to programming, this is true, but with more a little experience, I find this book invaluable. The book is about programming concepts explained using Java, it is not a java book.

The book was in pretty decent shape other than a few pages in the index that were unbinding from the rest of the book. The writing in the book actually helps me understand things better when I can actually read it.

I've had to read parts of other data structures books, and they've all been terrible. With this book, for the first time, I felt that the author was successful in clearly demonstrating the topics at hand. The examples and text are very clear and easy to understand. My only issue is that it's shallow in some areas. For example, the Balanced Trees section covers 2-3 trees and 2-3-4 trees, but only glosses over AVL and Red-Black trees. These topics are covered in the class I'm taking right now, so I was somewhat dismayed that I had to turn to online resources for these. That said, I'm very glad the professor chose this book over any other!

This was one of the best books in Computer Science. It is organized very well, made easy to understand. It is helpful to have have a book like this; I didn't need any help at all from my intructor to get the top grade. There's also many topics that you may want to keep for future reference. It's definately a good choice.