I am, in all likelihood, not in the target audience (having already spent much time with the material being presented), but this textbook has been a joy to read

I am, in all likelihood, not in the target audience (having already spent much time with the material being presented), but this textbook has been a joy to read so far. I am only up to page 14, and I already need two hands (in base 1...) to count the number of times I've laughed aloud or cheered a particular point being raised. Most algorithms books are dry, or they're obsessed by particular formal details, or (worse) they implicitly include optimizations in the algorithm without explaining what is needed for correctness and what is needed for efficiency. Having tutored on one of the books mentioned in the prologue, it can be a real struggle to gain a true intuition for algorithms when you can't yet tell the difference. But the sheer personality contained within this book is infectious, and it really is something of a page-turner. (Lest you think I haven't gotten to the stuff that "matters", I have read through the chapter on depth-first search -- again, an enjoyable read!) What a great book. I'm definitely recommending this to my friends.