I am taking a beginning course in algorithms this semester at Purdue and I have to conclude that nobody is learning anything from this book. Everybody I talk to here thinks the book is terrible (contradicting what a previous reader from purdue thought). The code is very useless and could be implemented in much better ways. They don't even explain what they are doing in their code! I also found the explaination of induction and big O notation to be patheticly short since that is a big part of the course. A book like this should focus more heavily on this and analyzing different loops to make a determination of their running times in functions. The main point of any book in cs is to provide real programming projects and take the reader through the development of them. This book glosses over very important topics like the ones I mentioned and seems to make it a goal of trying to confuse the reader. In short, there are much better books on this subject.