Reading the book isn't really good enough. The lessons are tucked into the well thought-out exercises, which is a feature that isn't found an many other texts.

Reading the book isn't really good enough. The lessons are tucked into the well thought-out exercises, which is a feature that isn't found an many other texts. The book was written a long time ago, yet they described MapReduce, and the industry took over 30 years to finally see the light. They described functional programming, and similarly, the industry took forever to catch up, though sadly FP is mostly being done very wrong. In this day and age of "get a job at CompanyX with 2 months of study," I'd argue that this book is even more valuable. It is an introductory text (where nearly every intro text is water-down; online isn't worth speaking on) that teaches the implementation details of common data structures, along with many clever approaches and tricks, all written and explained without being overly abstruse. Sure current resources may teach you to set up RoR and plug in flavor-of-the-day javascript, but those who built the meta-circular evaluator rightfully roll their eyes at yet another JS... evaluator.