Book Club

One of my criticisms of this book is its use of comments. I would like to see the book implement its comments in the JavaDoc style, which allows greater ease in producing readable documentation for objects and methods created in Java. I also found the code in this book to be a bit more verbose than needed, and at times, just incorrect. For instance, in the second chapter’s dealing with Bag collections, the authors choose to raise an error if an object is not in the bag. Using mathematical set theory (of which this is an implementation of), removing an item that is not in the set returns the set, not an error. There are also some logic errors throughout the code presented in the book (i.e. dequeue method on p. 203 increments its loop incorrectly). I’m sure that these problems will be fixed in future editions of this book, but in its current state, instructors using this book to teach classic software structures need to be mindful of these issues if they plan to incorporate this book into their curriculum.

Although there are some technical problems in this book, I did think the authors did a good job in introducing readers to implementing data structures in Java. My big question when first picking up the book was, “Why do we need this book, are nearly 95% of them in the collections API?” I was impressed that the authors dealt with this issue early in the text, along with pointing out some of the problems with using the collections API (i.e. java.util.Stack’s derivation from the Vector class).

Review by: Wayne Graham
March 4, 2004