Data Structures with STL

Rating:
Summary: Saved me a lot of work
Review: I am a 3rd year student taking a data structures course. We are allowed to program in any language we wish, so I chose C++. The professor gave us several projects during the current semester. I chose one on sorting. I was at the book store and saw this book on C++ and STL. There were some way cool examples on regular C++ coding and then the same stuff with STL. I bought the book.

When I really got into this, I learned a lot about the STL and included some of this stuff in my projects. I showed my professor the book. He was impressed (not just with the book but because I went out and bought an additional book for the class). Anyway - no one else did anything with the STL. Some dudes wrote C code (yeah - no joke) and one did a Java project (ugh). I got the A.

If I ever meet Murray and Pappas I owe them a drink.

Rating:
Summary: Saved me a lot of work
Review: I am a 3rd year student taking a data structures course. We are allowed to program in any language we wish, so I chose C++. The professor gave us several projects during the current semester. I chose one on sorting. I was at the book store and saw this book on C++ and STL. There were some way cool examples on regular C++ coding and then the same stuff with STL. I bought the book.

When I really got into this, I learned a lot about the STL and included some of this stuff in my projects. I showed my professor the book. He was impressed (not just with the book but because I went out and bought an additional book for the class). Anyway - no one else did anything with the STL. Some dudes wrote C code (yeah - no joke) and one did a Java project (ugh). I got the A.

If I ever meet Murray and Pappas I owe them a drink.

Rating:
Summary: Core Stuff
Review: I completed a review of the authors Template book and submitted it earlier. Then I was reminded that I also owned their Data Structure with STL book so I thought I would comment on this book too.

The writers said they wanted to write a book that complimented college text books on Data Structures. The twist that that they used (and the reason I bought the book) was the integration of STL into the matter.

I think the writers assumed you knew something about data structures and wanted a book with solutions (in STL) for many data structure applications.

They accomplished their goal. The book is filled with many neat solutions to standard data structure problems all in STL.

Buy the book if you are a student taking a Data Structures course. Buy the book if you just want to understand the STL better.

Rating:
Summary: Core Stuff
Review: I completed a review of the authors Template book and submitted it earlier. Then I was reminded that I also owned their Data Structure with STL book so I thought I would comment on this book too.

The writers said they wanted to write a book that complimented college text books on Data Structures. The twist that that they used (and the reason I bought the book) was the integration of STL into the matter.

I think the writers assumed you knew something about data structures and wanted a book with solutions (in STL) for many data structure applications.

They accomplished their goal. The book is filled with many neat solutions to standard data structure problems all in STL.

Buy the book if you are a student taking a Data Structures course. Buy the book if you just want to understand the STL better.

Rating:
Summary: Useful for what I needed
Review: I was very pleased with this book. I already knew data structures, and I have a very good reference book for STL "The C++ Standard Library, A Tutorial and Reference". I brought this book, because I wanted a bridge between the two areas. For example, common data structures are stacks and queue. The C++ STL book does not cover these topics until chapter 10, where this book covered them at chapter 3. It helped me to understand STL in terms of data structure theory, as opposed to just paraphrasing what exactly is STL. Since I used this book in conjunction with other books, the problems that the other reviewers had with this book I did not see.

Rating:
Summary: Useful for what I needed
Review: Prentice Hall has quite good reputation for publishing good computer books. (Although my favourite is Addison-Wesley.) This one is not one of them.

As a Data Structures book, this book deserved -1 star. As a STL book, however, it does deseverd 2 stars. So, I give it 1 stars in total.

Why? This book has one of the worst discussion/explaination on data structures I've ever read. It definitely not for someone who's learning the topic. Since learning data structures require much more discussion, like those in Mark Weiss's books and/or Carrano, Helman, Veroff's books (those are very good, really!). And, more important, this book does not talk about many important algorithm at all (saying the name of the algorithm doesn't count). For example, where is the explaination of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, B+ tree, etc?

It's not for someone who know the topics either. Since if one knows Data Structures, he/she would pick up the better book on STL (like Josuttis's and/or Musser's ) to learn STL. And write a better thing than what available from this book.

As the STL book, it should emphasize more on STL. For example, in the Priority Queue topic, instead of showing the example using priority_quere class, the author used his own implementation. The STL's implementation were briefly mentioned, and that is not enough.

Programming style is not-so-good, and some of their usages of STL is not-so-good is well. For example, Floyd's all-pair shortest path algorothm (page 388-399), there is the array version of the algorithm which was about one-and-half page long. And there is one that they called "STL version" which is 5 pages long... what happened? why it is that long? The answer: they used 4 pages to initialize vectors. Now, my question: "Who uses/initialize the vector container this way?"

One more thing, main function should return int, not void.

Conclusion: If you want Data structures book, look for something else. And if you want STL book, also look for something else. If you want Data Structures using/with STL, you have 2 choices 1) get something else for each, and 2) find some other books for it (Michael Main's lastest and Timothy Budd's DS using STL do the fine job, though...(Budd's is better, but I prefered Weiss's over both).

Rating:
Summary: Unreadable and confusing, several errors
Review: The stated purpose of this book is to teach data structures and the use of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) at the same time. Judging by the first chapter only (by the time I got to page 23, I was so disgusted I logged in here to write this review), it fails on both counts.

The writing style is an awful combination of chatty (exclamation points are scattered throughout the text) and deliberately over-technical. In just one example, the authors use the word "syntactically" four times in six sentences for no reason; the sentences would be utterly unchanged in meaning by taking them out. That's the kind of writing I've seen from students who are attempting to make themselves sound knowledgeable when they aren't really sure of their ground or don't know how to express concepts in clear, simple language.

The lack of clarity is bad enough, but on top of that there are several typos and factual misstatements just in the small section of the text that I read. The opening lines of the foreword:

"A knowledge of data structures has been a fundamental part of every Computer Science curriculum since the early days of PLI and Pascal. Of course, data structures in [sic] now taught using the C++ language."

So I take it no one teaches data structures in Pascal anymore? In C? In Java?

The authors then go on to talk about misuse and ignorance of C/C++ features and use as their example the perfectly correct line of C/C++ code:

iaccumulator = iaccumulator + 1;

They state that using this instead of

iaccumulator++;

is incorrect, because the postfix operator "efficiently instructs the compiler to delete the double fetch/decode of the incorrectly written translation, and to treat the variable iaccumulator as its name implies -- as an accumulator within a register, a much more efficient machine language encoding."

This is ridiculous. First of all, any halfway-decent optimizing compiler should translate the first version just as well as the second. In any modern machine with a decent number of GPRs, if the variable was being used frequently it would be kept in a register anyway. Not to mention that at least half the target audience for this text (students with basic C++ experience taking a data structures class) would find this a completely incomprehensible explanation.

The example code is badly formatted (excessively-long lines, inconsistent indentation, poorly-placed comments) and inelegant. I came across at least one typo in the code that was not only confusing but would not have compiled, so it's fairly clear that the authors didn't try out all of the code in the book. Judging by the number of typos in general, that means that the code isn't reliable.

I strongly advise anyone against purchasing this book. If you're looking for a good data structures textbook, I would suggest Sedgewick's Algorithms in C (parts 1-4). That book is lucid, well-organized, with many very elegant, concise, and correct code samples.