Use in the Curriculum

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There is a great deal of flexibility in how the material here can be taught, depending on the taste of the instructor and the preparation of the students. There is sufficient coverage of basic material for the book to be used to teach data structures to beginners, and there is sufficient detail and coverage of advanced material for the book to be used to teach the design and analysis of algorithms to upper-level students. Some instructors may wish to emphasize implementations and practical concerns; others may wish to emphasize analysis and theoretical concepts.

An elementary course on data structures and algorithms might emphasize the basic data structures in Part II and their use in the implementations in Parts III and IV. A course on design and analysis of algorithms might emphasize the fundamental material in Part I and Chapter 5, then study the ways in which the algorithms in Parts III and IV achieve good asymptotic performance. A course on software engineering might omit the mathematical and advanced algorithmic material, and emphasize how to integrate the implementations given here into large programs or systems. A course on algorithms might take a survey approach and introduce concepts from all these areas.

Earlier editions of this book that are based on other programming languages have been used at scores of colleges and universities as a text for the second or third course in computer science and as supplemental reading for other courses. At Princeton, our experience has been that the breadth of coverage of material in this book provides our majors with an introduction to computer science that can be expanded on in later courses on analysis of algorithms, systems programming, and theoretical computer science, while providing the growing group of students from other disciplines with a large set of techniques that these people can put to good use immediately.

The exercises nearly all of which are new to this third edition fall into several types. Some are intended to test understanding of material in the text, and simply ask readers to work through an example or to apply concepts described in the text. Others involve implementing and putting together the algorithms, or running empirical studies to compare variants of the algorithms and to learn their properties. Still others are a repository for important information at a level of detail that is not appropriate for the text. Reading and thinking about the exercises will pay dividends for every reader.

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