A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

This was one of the first books I worked on at Pragmatic, and probably the first where I felt like I made a big difference in the development of the book. Data structures and algorithms tend to be taught in an academic way, which isn unfortunate if you’ve acquired your skills in a different way and you run into an algorithm question in an interview. Jay has experience teaching this topic, and his explanations were first-rate. I’ve had experience working on books on this topic, and in my experience, clear diagrams make a ton of difference, so I was able to advise Jay on that point. We ended up with a lot of images, which makes for a production challenge, but in my opinion it was worth the trouble. And we were apparently right, as the book has been a regular best-seller, it’s gone on to a second edition, and has also spun off several language-specific data structures books.