Introduction to Algorithms

The de facto standard for many algorithms courses. It's a great text with well-structured proofs, examples and exercises. It's also a great reference that I constantly find on the shelves of co-workers. Definitely a keeper that will come in handy for years to come.

Definitely not for those without a strong discrete math background. This book gives you the foundations and not just code.

Cheaper than the bookstores as always.

This is a comprehensive book that covers major areas of algorithms for software developers and students. I would rate it as an intermediate book and have used it for learning up topics out of sequence. I still find myself using Wikipedia or other books for better readability or a variation in approach.
The broad areas include Sorting, HashTables, Tree (Binary Search, Red Black, Graphs, String Matching, NP complete problems and the algorithms are in a psuedo code format. Most of the chapters includes proofs for correction and runtime analysis and problems to solve as an exercise.
There is a 3 chapter appendix for Mathematical background and explaining notations.
The latest printing (eight I believe) of second edition is from 2003, the one from 2001 (3-5 printings) have a slightly larger errata.

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This book has a lot of information, but the class I had only covered about half the book. I wish this book only had that half because it was a chore hauling this thing around with me at school.

In my experience, this is the book by which other algorithm texts are measured. The authors are comprehensive and knowledgable. I've actually had people come up to me after noticing me reading the book and say: "Hey, I took that class!".

One criticism is the lack of graphic depictions of many of the algorithms and concepts being presented. I'm a visual learner and I found myself totally baffled by some of the text-only explanations. I would LOVE to see Java animations of each algorithm/concept included on the CD-ROM. There are web sites that provide some of these animations but they don't always match one-for-one with this books version, plus you have to spend an undue amount of time searching for them.

Overall this is a good book and well worth every cent. The material is covered better than most data structure text books. It also avoids using recursion in situations when its not needed. For example, the texts chapter on red-black trees is probably the best I've seen. It explains key concepts while building on previous knowledge with notes to where the previous material was covered. The red-black tree is explained without using recursion, because the authors were smart enough to have realized the general reader cares about creating practical data structures without any or much lost in performance. Cormen et al does this well indeed. Each algorithm is laid out in pseudo-code that can easily be adapted to code in any language. One of my dissatisfactions was with the presentation of the pseudocode in that the indentation was done in a strange manner. This made the scope of the blocks of logic in certain algorithms confusing. Furthermore, the binding of the book is quite fragile and would most likely be broken with casual use as a textbook in college. However, I suspect the author did this to lower the price for college students and I thank him for that. In conclusion, this is near perfect book and is the reason why I give it four stars instead of five.

If you are seeking a good data structure or algorithm textbook, then you cannot go wrong with Introduction to Algorithms.