Average Customer Review:  
| Classic text, but those looking for OOP may be disapointed | |
I first read Sedgewick's Algorithms many years ago for a programming class in college. I was impressed at the time by it's clear presentation and thorough handling of the most fundamental data structures and algorithms. Queues, hash tables, various flavors of trees and graphs... it's all explained quite well in the text. The orginal edition had code examples in Pascal, and when I lost that copy, I decided to get the 'C++' version. The content is basically identical -- which is not necessarily a bad thing. Those looking for modern object-oriented code examples, however, will be dissapointed. Only the most minimal effort has been made to go from the original Pascal listings. It is really a matter of expectations. The code is not the most readable (many single letter variable names), but the true value of this book is the text, not the code.
| Great for Algorithms, perhaps not for C++ implementations | |
This is easily one of the leading texts on data structures and algorithms - a third edition has already been released (however, that is practically a new book ,so read on :-)...). Sedgewick is a student of the great Donald Knuth, and a leading researcher and authority in the field of Algorithmics.'Pound for pound', this might be as good as Cormen et al's classic, which is the undisputed leader among introductory books on algorithms. However, this has two advantages over that book : (1)Size : Weighing in at a lean 656 pages, this is almost 40% smaller than Cormen's classic, while providing approximately the same breadth. However, Cormen has the edge in depth, especially rigorous analysis of algorithms' performance. (2)'Real' code : This book has code snippets in C++, as opposed to Cormen which has it in pseudocode.However, the code is far from 'ready to run' - it's just enough to give you an idea how to go about building your own code. Another plus point is short and crisp chapters which can be easily 'digested' - average chapter size is only about 14 pages. This book really covers a lot of topics - sorting, searching, parsing, computational geometry, graphs, fast fourier transforms, mathematical algorithms and much,much more. It is written in a very readable style, and the illustrations are a big help, perhaps the best in a book of this kind. It would've benefitted from a few more exercises, brief solutions, and a little more rigour in performance analysis. The code is excellent at one level, but it's actually excellent C code masquerading as C++ code, i believe. If you have no problem with C, you should perhaps go for the C version of this book - the C code is reminiscent of Kernighan & Ritchie. Beautiful, elegant C code !! If it's good C++ code that you're after, perhaps Mark Allen Weiss's book or Heileman's book might be a better choice. Also, the new (3rd) edition of this book has much better C++ code. If you want more depth and rigour, and are willing to work a little harder, then Cormen's the way to go. However, if you want a bit of everything in one compact book, then this is the best choice. (Sedgewick's come up with a recent revision, but it's spread over several volumes - not sure whether that's a better choice, however the C++ code seems much better in that, with C++ consultancy by Chris Van Wyk, another student of the great Don Knuth)
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