Frankly, this book is neither here nor there - not a bad book per se, but there are other, much better, choices.

First of all, this is not introductory in the strict sense - you should be fairly good at C programming, but need not know data structures and algorithms. But it can be considered as an introduction to data structures and algorithms if you aren't a novice in C programming.

It is fairly light on maths and analysis of algorithm performance, which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your requirements. I read the C version of the book, which was quite OK, but i've read much better books since, and the C++ seems to have been added on for market appeal - i feel one should be wary of books which claim to be in ' C and C++ ' ......... make up your mind !!

What i'd suggest is, if you're happy with pseudocode that you can adapt to your needs and don't care for a particular language, go for 'Introduction to algorithms' by Cormen,Leiserson & Rivest.

If you want code in C, go for Sedgewick's 'Algorithms in C' - arguably as good Cormen et al's book on concepts, and 'K & R' class code, ie C code that will remind you of Kernighan & Ritchie's classic C textbook.

However, if you want C++, then Sedgewick's C++ version or Mark Allen Weiss's book might be a good choice.

To be fair, this is a reasonably good book, with the explanations being reasonably clear, but the breadth & depth simply don't compete with the books mentioned above. After all, if you can get great books, why settle for anything less ?

I am from Purdue University, this course is a core requirement for Electrical Computer Engineering. I don't understand why are you beginners want to read this book? You have to finished Advanced C Programming before even try to read this book. It is not meant for rookie! This book is Data Structure which teach you algorithms for sorting and search data using binary tree, recursions, linklist and lots other algorithms. There are not much of C code in the book, because once you understand the algorithms, you can implement in any kinds of code you want.

First off, my suggestion for this book would be as follows. For the computer science or electrical engineering students taking a data structures class to supplement lecture material. Don't get this book if you come from some other language, know your C at least. If you are a beginning C/C++ programmer that needs to learn data structures without having the benefit of an instructor I wouldn't recommend this book, try something less formal unless you love reading technical books.

The book covers a good amount of material and as the preface of the book states it is meant for a 2 semester course in data structures. The book covers stacks, recursion, queues, list, binary trees, sorting, searching, hashing, graphs, etc... All that is essential to becoming a well founded programmer. There are exercises at the end of each chapter to reinforce the material. The material presented is theoretical in nature not much C/C++ code but that's fine.

My opinion of this book has changed over the last year. I had to purchase the book for my first data structures class in college. After reading just the first chapter I was bewildered and confused! Most of the students agreed with me that it was a confusing book and without the benefit of an excellent instructor we'd surely would've been lost. I cannot stress this enough, unless you are very smart student this book should be a supplement to lecture material. I personally didn't read the chapters until after lecture and it usual for me read material before class.

But now a year after I first opened the book I find it a truly great reference. Certainly the book has grown on me and maybe later I'd probably give it a five. For example, recently I had to write a threaded example for my Windows programming class and I wanted to something time consuming yet simple that actually did something, so I just referred to the book on the fibonacci sequence using recursion and used that.

My final thoughts about this book are a bit strange. First off, this is the only data structures book I have read (so far) therefore my opinion lacks some perspective. At first I didn't like it but as time has passed I find that I really like the book. If you are a student going into a data structures class, most likely you'll be required to get a book on data structures and it's possible that you won't get assigned this book. But I would recommend it after you take the class. If you do get it for your class, don't sell it back to the school! You may just find it useful in the future.

This book had a lot of interesting information about how the internals of Linux file systems, but was pretty useless in explaining how to actually use them for anything. It was also really hard to read and had a lot of stuff that you could find anywhere on the web. If you want to write a filesystem this book might be useful. If you just want information or actually want to use an advanced Linux file system, get William Von Hagen's "Linux Filesystems."

I bought this book expecting to get a step-by-step description of what is a file system and how Linux implements them. I ended up liking this book because it describes the most important file systems in Linux and how they are structured. After reading this book you sit down and modify an existing file system for your own particular needs or write your own file system from scratch. If you are a serious Linux hackers, this book is worth its money.

i bought this book hoping that it would delve in to the code of the different filesystems. instead it breifly goes over how to use the filesystems and some of they main features, little more than a generic write up. this book, might be useful to someone who has money to waste and doesn't really know that much about filesystems but to few others.

Amazing as it is that someone would go to some length to find this out of print book, I would advise readers to save their effort. Unless of course you were researching unrealistic, muddled, egotistical architects of the latter half of the 20th century. Habitat itself, though an intriguing architectural concept and a great student thesis, was a miserable failure as livable space. Mr Safdie, though still willing to beat this dead horse, does not seem capable of learning from his mistakes- he is a genuis at further profiting from them, through vehicles such as this book.

Beyond Habitat is beyond an architectural record. It offers a look into the life of a lucky and successful architect in the politicized realm of a government funded building. I thoroughly enjoyed not just the glimpse into Moshe's fascinating life, but also his views on where we might be going, architecturally and socially. I think the review from 1997 show's this perfectly, where life in the Americas has gone, and where, at one point, it may have gone. I encourage anyone with an interest in architecture, or anyone that enjoys an interesting biographical story to check this book out.

Americans have for two centuries had a special tie to the Holy Land, and Davis, professor emeritus of American Jewish History and Institutions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has devoted much of his career to illuminating this connection.

The somewhat casually written volume under review includes such interesting facts as: In 1788, during the Constitutional Convention, the Hartford Courant published a letter from a reader who argued that the president of the United States should not also be commander-in-chief, on the grounds that "should he hereafter be a Jew, our dear posterity may be ordered to rebuild Jerusalem." In contrast, the first Zionist declaration by an American politician came in 1819, when John Adams wrote, "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation." Emma Lazarus, author of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty and of the lines about "Give me your tired, your poor," also believed that Jews would find their haven in Eretz Yisra'el. Mark Twain wrote of American pilgrims to the Holy Land that "they could no more write dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about their own wives and children." Nearly four hundred villages, towns, and cities in the United States have names from the Jewish Bible, ranging from the twenty-seven incidences of Salem to the whole pseudo-biblical geography around Salt Lake City.

Davis argues that these many signs point to an attitude of considerable political importance: "helping the Jews in Eretz Israel not only conformed to the spirit of America but enhanced it."

Middle East Quarterly, June 1995

A set of essays by different authors discussing Americans' relationship to Israel. Most of the essays (but not all) focus on the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

The essays vary widely in quality. Some are fairly interesting snapshots of American attitudes (I especially liked the essay discussing the evolution of Mormon attitudes towards Israel from strongly pro-Zionist to conversion-oriented). Other essays were sleep-inducing laundry lists of American good deeds.

In a brief period during 1950-51, over 120,000 Jews fled Iraq and arrived in Israel; almost a half century later, this still ranks as one of the largest airlift operation ever in the history of population transfers. Although Iraqi Jews became a major stalwart of the new country, to this day they retain an undertone of resentment about the circumstances of their immigration. Theories abound that Israel's agents subverted their comfortable place in Iraq to spur them onto the planes.

Drawing on newly-released Israeli, British, and American archives, Gat offers a compelling account of the circumstances behind "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah." It's a tale replete with paradoxes and Gat deals with them in turn. Iraq, the most anti-Zionist state, insisted that its Jewish population go forthwith to Israel. At one point, the Israelis authorities gained leverage over their Iraqi counterparts by not taking in as many immigrants as Baghdad wanted to go. At other times, the two enemies were effectively cooperating, as when the Israelis decided to increase the pace of absorption and the Iraqis soon after responded by permitting direct flights from Baghdad to Tel Aviv.

The author puts to rest the notion that Israeli agents used terrorism to get Iraqi Jews to make aliyah: "there was no connection between the bomb-throwing incidents and the departure of the Jews." The sudden rush to leave Iraq overwhelmed Israel's capacities and resulted not from mischief but from the Iraqi Jews' well-grounded sense of impending doom unless they took advantage of a unique chance to escape.

Middle East Quarterly, Sept 1997

Likely to market a larger audience, this book presents an overview - and only an overview - of modern advances in artificial life. (It does contain good suggestions for further reading however.) Dr. Sipper always makes for interesting and entertaining reading but those looking for more technical details might consider his earlier effort, the highly recommended "Evolution of Parallel Cellular Machines."

The subtitle was supposed to read 'from war to peace,' but a recalcitrant Hafiz al-Asad spoiled the symmetry. This misplaced optimism in a Syrian willingness to end the conflict with Israel results from Ma'oz's dubious conclusion that, as far back as 1988, Asad made the strategic decision 'to reach a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict''political, that is, and not military. Unfortunately, the evidence that Ma'oz so scrupulously marshals does not support this thesis, rendering his coverage of events since 1988 somewhat hollow. (If Asad has in fact 'given priority' to a diplomatic rather than a military strategy, why has so little happened in eight years?)

With this exception, Ma'oz has written an excellent survey of Syrian-Israeli relations since 1948. He shows how the bilateral relationship of two states with a combined population of under twenty million, normally not of much interest to the outside world, in this case is of great interest indeed. He recounts how they went to war four times and skirmished on countless occasions, how for many years each side represented a great power alliance, how their confrontation now dominates the military dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and how complex is the diplomacy between them. While conceding that the Palestinians are at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he convincingly shows that the Syrians alone have 'manifested a consistent political and ideological hostility to the Jewish entity since the 1920s, and a military threat to Israel's security since 1938.'

Middle East Quarterly, June 1996

When I saw that the author's other books included two new age titles, I should have cut my losses.

This book offers the reader a methodological equivalent of magnet therapy. If you're interested in learning "the right way", check out other product development titles at Amazon.com, and look into the PDMA.

My impression of the book was, if I had gotten it when I started as a new project manager at Sun Microsystems, I would have avoided making a lot of mistakes, gotten organized faster, kept better control of my team and the project and overall been successful a whole lot quicker. There's a lot of good, useful info here neatly packaged in one place. Good desk reference, kept me from buying a bunch of project management books. Easily readable and digestible, with a sense of fun, believe it or not.

This book has some good points, but mostly sucks. A lot of what you'll get out of it is dependent on what you know. If you're a newbie, it's going to screw you up. The book has obviously been through a very poor editing process, and there are plenty of mistakes that will confuse you and lead you down the wrong path. Some of this is extremely evident (in the beginning the author makes a personal note to remember to explain the origins of Linux w/ some background on Minix thrown in, then injects this info into the middle of his topic). If you're just past the novice user stage and entering development, there are a few gems of info, but really nothing that would warrant the books price, ... list, or even Amazon's discounted price ... However, if you can pick up a copy for less than 15 bucks, I'd recommend it. If your past the new developer stage, well, prepare to be disappointed. The author wrote a very short book then bulked it up by including code from the header files of a linux distribution. The rest isn't really worth reading, and overall not reliable enough to use as a reference guide.

Luckily, I bought this book from Borders. Started reading it and realized I'd been scammed. Finished reading it (takes about 15 hours to realy give it a fair shake), and after I got done laughing at all the mistakes make, ...

This is a surprising readable book considering that highly technical topics such as this are often difficult to write about. It is certainly a much better read than the other books about the Linux kernel currently in print. As the author points out in the preface, this book is not intended as a full source code commentary of the kernel, rather it focuses upon describing those parts of the kernel that are relevant to performance issues of the OS and user applications. Certainly some esoteric topics of particular interest to kernel hackers are likely missing but on the other hand more practical topics such as filesystems (including JFS and LVM) and signal handling are well covered.

The author's writing style can be a bit obtrusive at times and it would have been nice if a good technical editor had also corrected some of the more glaring errors such as "next'ed" instead of "nested" or the overuse of the adverb "excellently". The extracts of code from the kernel are generally well selected and short enough to comprehend along the with associated discussion.

Overall, I would recommend this book to someone already knowledgeable with Linux and familiar with C programming who would like to obtain a better grasp of how the kernel is designed and what the resulting implications are for the performance of the system.

This is a book for people who want to have an overall understanding of the Linux kernel 2.4 without wanting to know each and every function name by heart. It shows how the main components work and what the design decisions were behind them. The source code in each chapter makes it easy to check with what is explained. You must know the Linux basics, though (as Bar says in the introductory chapter), to be able to keep up with the author.

Overall a very good book and it sure helped me grasp just what the Linux kernel is about. Al Stevens of Dr. Dobbs Journal likes the book, too by the way.