Data Structures the Fun Way by Jeremy Kubica

“Data Structures the Fun Way” targets students or people already working. While you don't need to know any language in particular, you should know one. The examples are written in a Python'ish pseudocode.

As you might imagine from the title, this book is a fun read. The author writes “Similes are scattered through this book like blueberries through a muffin.” There's also lots of coffee examples such as the coffee barista using a Bloom filter.

There's lots of diagrams helping to visualize the algorithms. Each chapter ends with “why this matters” to tie what you learned to programming at large.

While the book does start with “what is a variable”, this is meant as review. The same chapter covers insertion sort. The book does cover advanced topics like B-trees and grids. My favorite chapter was the one on caching.

I learned a lot of this in college, but that was long enough to forget a bunch. This was a fun review. And it seems like it would also be clear and fun to someone learning the topics for the first time.

I would have rather a real language be used than pseudocode to let readers play with the examples, but overall a great read.

I give this book 8 out of 10 horseshoes.

A received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review.