The code examples in this book require cryptography to interpret - the idea of meaningful variable names is not something that the author subscribes to. I would not recommend this book to anyone starting out programming because it reinforces bad code layout, and doesn't show what can be done by using sensible variable names to help write self-documenting code. More experienced programmers would probably rather read pseudocode anyway... Algorithms in C is significantly less useful than the earlier Algorithms book by the same author.