A Comparison of Four Algorithms Textbooks

The Poetry Of Computer Science

At some point, you can’t get any further with linked lists, selection sort, and voodoo Big O, and you have to go get a real algorithms textbook and learn all that horrible math, at least a little. But which book? There are tons of them.

I haven’t read every algorithms book out there, but I have read four of them. Maybe my experience with these four can help guide your decision. The four books are Algorithms, by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani (hereafter called Dasgupta); Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein (hereafter called CLRS); The Algorithm Design Manual, by Steve Skiena (hereafter called Skiena); and The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3. I’ll do a five-point comparison, going over the prose style, code use, mathematical heaviness, breadth and depth of topics, and position on the continuum between theoretical and practical of each book.

There’s one thing you should know before I start: Skiena and Dasgupta are both available for free online, while Knuth and CLRS aren’t (well, they probably are, but not legally). So that might make your decision for you.