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Comment by Jabbles | Hacker News Reader

So... who's read it? sonabinu? Have you actually used this book enough to recommend it?

The fact that it's freely available online doesn't make it worth reading. If someone is actually recommending it, I'd like to know why they prefer this over, say "The Algorithm Design Manual". Just posting a link tells me nothing. I hope the people that say they're going to try reading this can give a detailed review in a few weeks' time - or even a few hours' - I'd be much more content diving into a chapter of this if I knew someone else thought it worthwhile.

Edit: I see jasim has read it :)

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This book was used for an algorithms class for which I was the TA. My experience suggests that students who lack sufficient grounding in discrete math will have trouble with some concepts as the book speeds past them without giving any supplementary explanation.

That said, if I were teaching algorithms in a classroom setting I'd probably still use this book and supplement it with lectures where it falls short on deep details.

If you're looking for a book to pick up on your own it all depends on your math background. You might find yourself using Google frequently to clarify things, or you might be just fine.

This book was used for my algorithms class last year. I never buy textbooks because I never really find them useful (especially CS books). This book, however, I thought did a great job of explaining how things work and was a pretty easy read. I even found myself reading ahead and reading content we didn't cover in class.

If algorithms are interesting to you, I certainly wouldn't turn you away from it.

I am doing my MS in Software Engineering and currently reading it.

I took the course with papdomitrou (one of the authors), and he didn't supplement the book at all (his lectures were literally just the book in spoken word form, down to the jokes). I really liked the book and lecture, though, since I thought it did a great job explaining the material at a good level for an intro algorithms course high enough that you aren't bogged down in formalism and esoteric math, but deep enough that you still understand the algorithms well enough to recognize where to apply them in the real world.

I took a class that used this book at Berkeley. I think it's kind of like a wikipedia article in a book--it's clear and easy to read (well, easier than most other textbooks!)

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