Author Scott Robert Ladd brings you lots of old friends in new clothes. The quicksort, a staple of C, Pascal, and other languages, appears here in Java, as do the Shell sort and other popular sorts. (The bubble sort, friend of high school computer-science students everywhere, is mercifully left out.) You'll also find math algorithms (including a cool polynomial class), GUI layout tools, data trees, serialization, compression, and other topics--all explained in text that's a pleasure to read.
The author's writing strengths become most evident when he explains string-search algorithms. Ladd walks you through the behavior of his code step by step, making things clear without making you feel as if you are being spoken down to. All the code in the book appears on the companion CD-ROM, ready to be used piecemeal or included in programs as the coyote.* packages. --David Wall