I'm going to disagree slightly with your choice (which was also my choice at first). While A.D.M. has all the topics you would be interested in, I think the boo

I'm going to disagree slightly with your choice (which was also my choice at first). While A.D.M. has all the topics you would be interested in, I think the book assumes that you have already groked the fundamentals behind, say, why a linked list is different from an array. For an absolute beginner, I would suggest the type of book that forces you to go through every step of deleting an item from a list, which is something Skiena's book (luckily) doesn't do. The book is great for learning new ways to think about problems, but IMHO a beginner should learn the basic ways first. "Introduction to Algorithms" by CLRS seems to be the default choice, and it seems to me to be a step in the right direction (based on the TOC). I would also like to second your point that CS is more than algorithms and data structures. I feel Dijkstra would not approve of thinking about CS as "that thing you do after learning a programming language".