In their book The Practice of Programming, Kernighan and Pike explain the really important stuff in about 30 pages, chapter 2 in the book. They cover four data

In their book The Practice of Programming, Kernighan and Pike explain the really important stuff in about 30 pages, chapter 2 in the book. They cover four data structures: array, list, tree and hash table, and two kinds of algorithms: sorting and searching. They say that just these are enough for most common situations. (They use C.)