database design

The intro chapters (including a preview of the new edition) are amongst the worst intro to java. Typos, use of deprecated methods abound and several key areas (complexity analysis) are awkward at best.

As an undergraduate in computer science, I absolutely hate this book. It places way too much emphasis on object-oriented programming (OOP), instead of concentrating on its main topic, data structures. It makes an artificial distinction between what it calls the "user" of a class and the "developer" of the class, and tries to introduce pre-programmed data structures first from the "user's" point-of-view, and only later mentioning the real implementation of the data structures. The author apparently fails to grasp that students cannot truly understand data structures until they have programmed their own data structures from scratch. The book also makes excessive and superfluous use of things such as preconditions and postconditions. For example, how truly enlightening is the following postcondition for the IsEmpty() method of the ArrayList class?

// Postcondition: true has been returned if this ArrayList object has no elements. Otherwise, false has been returned.

If you want a good introduction to Data Structures, then you should look for a different book, preferably one that uses a better language than Java. Okay, I admit that C/C++ pointers are difficult to learn at first, but after you've used them for a while, it's fairly intuitive. Java's "references", on the other hand, are easy to use at first, but when you try to implement linked data structures, they become confusing and non-intuitive.

This is a rather dense book and spents more time on Linked Lists than any other Data Structures in Java books I have seen on the market.