Hyperbolic remarks about this book will mislead you into thinking that this book is absolutely unique, when it's not. The material here is standard and present on many, many algorithms and data structures book.

Furthermore, this book is dated, as it uses Pascal. It has very little relevance for today's world of collections of data structures made by experts (on Java, C#, Eiffel, Smalltlak, etc.) which are resources you need to know how to tap into to be more productive.

And as a last point, algorithm analysis is not the strong point of this book either, as it is just a late chapeter in the book and gets nowhere near advanced (i.e., real) algorithmic analysis (for which you will need higher math, such as calculus and probability).

Nevertheless, it's a good book but I don't know if you should buy it instead of that other, nice and new book using Java 5.0 using generics.

It is just an okay book, not extraordinary in any way. Especially, this is certainly not for the novice in this topic, i.e., it is certainly not a good introductory book. So if you are new to data structures and algorithms, stay away from this book, go for some good introductory book.

For the advanced readers, it is an okay book. Better books are available, e.g., books by Cormen et al. and Robert Sedgewick.

The book is written in a way not very intersting or engaging. The algorithms are not explained in detail. Often things are left unexplained or assumed that the reader already knows it. Algorithms are presented in pseudocode, which causes problems especially for the readers familiar to some particular programming language.

This book explains very clearly the subjects of data structures and algorithms. Its in-depth coverage is very intuitive and easy to follow unlike other literature that is often tedious or esoteric.
The only complaint I have is the choice of the programming language. Pascal is a language of the past. A new edition using C will make this book simply a gem.

Perfect book. Nice and small. You can buy it cheap too, it's old. But it's full of the meat and potatoes, no fluffy Java source code. Sure, it uses Pascal, but it's not that hard to understand Pascal code even if you never programmed in Pascal (me neither). What matters is the discussions behind the scenes. It covers the whole range of what you should know and it's concise. They don't write books like this anymore.

I believe two books make a classic collection in data structures - one was the data structures book by sartaj sahni (his first edition book many years ago - I haven't looked at his recent books). That was the book I had to study when I was an undergrad student. Now I was entrusted with the task of teaching Data Structures and after looking at several books, this is the one I chose (may be because it comes most close to the style of teaching using psuedo-pascal that I grew up with).

I believe psuedo languages are the best way to learn concepts of any computer science area without getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of a language's syntax and semantics. I found the problems at the end of the chapters to be thoughtful and not extremely hard for undergraduate students. This book also goes into brief mathematical aspects of analysing the complexity of algorithms where necessary. The mathematical analysis is usually the part that most undergrad students moan and groan about, but they better get used to it IMO, if they wish to elevate themselves from the ranks of "a programmer" to an software / algorithm designer.

I have to agree that this book can be extremely hard for the weaker students in the class who have never had any programming or basic college algebra exposure. For all others, this book should be great.