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Practical Data Structures in C++ by Bryan Flamig Recommended

ISBN: 0-471-55863-X       Publisher: Wiley       Pages: 436pp+disk       Price: £37-95

Categories:   data structures     advanced c++

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 5-6 (Sep 1993)

The book is about the fundamental data structures that should be part of any programmers tool kit. Things like strings, vectors, matrices, linked lists a variety of trees etc.

The author hasn't wasted valuable printing space by listing reams of source code which no sane person would dream of typing in. Instead the book restricts itself to the source code that is necessary for the reader to make sense of the text.

The source code to put it all into effect is on the disk that comes with the book. How I wish more publishers would do the same, it makes both elements work well together and saves many trees.

The author knows more than most and his chapter on Data Structure Design in C++ is considerably above the average. He distinguishes between concrete and abstract data types. Though his distinction isn't quite that which Bjarne Stroustrup makes. Personally I prefer to consider four major types of class, concrete (which implements some real type of data that might well have been implemented as a builtin in an alternative universe), single use (the programmer just wants to get it working), re-usable (it is intended to be a base class in a static environment) and polymorphic (intended to provide facilities for runtime binding); but at least the author doesn't make the mistake of bundling everything into a single view. (There are also some rather more specialised class types, such as wrappers, dataless classes etc.)
To get best benefit from this book you need to be using a compiler that supports templates. While the author used Borland C++ 3.1 as his primary development and test environment he has also test compiled under unix using a late version of AT&T's Cfront. As long as your machine can read 720K MSDOS format 3.5" disks you should be able to get good use from this book.