You need to learn graph traversal (Dijkstra/BFS) or dynamic programming. He doesn't cover them. Final Thoughts Reading Peter Brass feels like having a grumpy, genius professor sitting next to you. He assumes you are smart, he doesn't hold your hand, and he moves fast.
9/10 (Deducted 1 point for the brutal exercise sets that have no solutions available online).
If you hang around computer science forums long enough, you’ll notice a pattern. Everyone praises CLRS (Cormen et al.) as the Bible of algorithms. You’ll see endless love for Skiena and Sedgewick . But every few months, a quiet, slightly cryptic recommendation appears in a Reddit thread or a Stack Exchange comment: “You should really read Brass.”
Have you read Brass? Did you find a clean PDF or did you break down and buy the hardcover? Let me know in the comments below.
Here is my review and analysis of why this book is the unsung hero of practical data structure theory. First, a warning. This is not a beginner’s guide. If you are just learning what a linked list is, stay far away from Brass.
I recently decided to hunt down a PDF of this text to see if it lived up to the cult hype. Spoiler: It does, but not for the reasons you might expect.