general

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.

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...

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.