Data Structures and Problem Solving Using Java (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Vague and lacking in clear description
Review: Extremely esoteric. Weiss is a terrible explaner of complicated ideas. Virtually every student in the Java class at my university complained about his terrible writing. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

Rating:
Summary: Good Code, Terrible Explanations
Review: I am using this book in a class on Data Structures and Algorithms. This book has a lot of material and code in it which makes it good. However, his explanations are terrible. They are ambiguous and unclear. If you can teach yourself from the code, then this is a good book for you. If your looking for clear explanations, look somewhere else.

Rating:
Summary: It was OK
Review: I just finished a data structures course where we used this book. The book is decent, but I know if I had not had earlier experience with C++, I would have been lost.

Rating:
Summary: Significantly better than others
Review: I read this book and also "A practical introduction to data structures and algorithims" by Schaffer. Weiss' was much clearer; the code was cleaner and less confusing.

Rating:
Summary: Will work for the right type of person.
Review: I think the intention with this book was to present the basic ADTs (abstract data types) in a sufficiently generic way that you could "transport" the ideas to other languages. However, as other people have mentioned, the example code provided in the book is not very detailed. Despite the sparse code, I was still able to write my own data structures in JAVA and feel that the book prepared me to write them in other languages as well.

Rating:
Summary: Will work for the right type of person.
Review: I think the intention with this book was to present the basic ADTs (abstract data types) in a sufficiently generic way that you could "transport" the ideas to other languages. However, as other people have mentioned, the example code provided in the book is not very detailed. Despite the sparse code, I was still able to write my own data structures in JAVA and feel that the book prepared me to write them in other languages as well.

Rating:
Summary: book is superb
Review: I took this class with the author, the book and class were excellent. The java that is covered is done in a much better way than any other java book I have. The book explains with good examples to get the reader to understand topics like runtime, big oh and the collections api and many different structures. I'd recommend this book to anyone taking data structures.

Rating:
Summary: Disastrous
Review: I tried my very best to follow the examples in the book, and when it came to recursion, I found that many parts of the code were not explained at all. This book confuses. Do not buy if you're a computer science beginner. It is simply not beginner-friendly.

Rating:
Summary: A terrible, terrible book
Review: I was recently shanghied into buying this book by a 300-level Computer Science course I'm taking. This book is horrible. The code is poorly commented and looks like C masquerading as Java. I'm guessing that much of it was originally C. From a software engineering standpoint, there are some serious questions about the code in this book. For example, in the section on Binary Trees, most of the traversal algorithms are implemented at the level of the BinaryNode component rather than in the Tree container class. This may the code easier to write, but it is poor design. The math in this book is very hand-wavy, and still unreadable. There is no mention of SkipLists, a simple new data structure which is quickly replacing balanced trees.
If you don't need this book for testing and homework purposes(i.e. kowtowing to the academic powers that be) I would recommend that you avoid it...

Rating:
Summary: Terribly confusing
Review: If you are new to computer science, do not read this book. It's poorly written and the algorithms are poorly explained. There are many superior books on data structures out there.