I use this and Aho:s "Foundations of Computer science" as an index to computer science.
For that purpose I found this book very useful, but then again, I don't have a formal CS background (my major was physics).
I go for other sources to understand the specifics of an implementation. The practical examples of where, when, and why would I use a particular method were really useful.
It's very hard to imagine a single book that would suffice as a resource.
For a person like myself, who writes lots of performance critical stuff in C++ I would combine this with something like Aho: "Foundations of computer science" and Loudon: "Mastering algorithm with C" and for perfomance Ericson: "Real time collision detection" and Agner Fog's excellent optimization resources (http://www.agner.org/optimize/).
This book helps to bring out the view that isomorphism is the superpower of applied computer science - once we identify that our problem is by formal definition exactly the same as that other problem we read about we can solve it usually very neatly.
For me, this book gave a very valuable practical exposition of several patterns of usage. Like Steve Yegge commented, for example, the content of graphs was enormously useful to me.
I've only read brief parts, but I haven't found another text comparable in apt content selection for computer science in general--and the authors' credentials are of course... the best.
For that purpose I found this book very useful, but then again, I don't have a formal CS background (my major was physics).
I go for other sources to understand the specifics of an implementation. The practical examples of where, when, and why would I use a particular method were really useful.
It's very hard to imagine a single book that would suffice as a resource.
For a person like myself, who writes lots of performance critical stuff in C++ I would combine this with something like Aho: "Foundations of computer science" and Loudon: "Mastering algorithm with C" and for perfomance Ericson: "Real time collision detection" and Agner Fog's excellent optimization resources (http://www.agner.org/optimize/).
This book helps to bring out the view that isomorphism is the superpower of applied computer science - once we identify that our problem is by formal definition exactly the same as that other problem we read about we can solve it usually very neatly.
For me, this book gave a very valuable practical exposition of several patterns of usage. Like Steve Yegge commented, for example, the content of graphs was enormously useful to me.