You are correct, but the author doesn't seem to be either from the US or a software engineer (his LinkedIn profile indicates a non-technical role). That said,

You are correct, but the author doesn't seem to be either from the US or a software engineer (his LinkedIn profile indicates a non-technical role). That said, there's also little harm for a programmer brushing up a bit further than needed on algorithms: skip list, for example, is a great example of a data structure that is less known (perhaps less so after ConcurrentSkipListMap in JDK 6), is commonly used for interviews (as it's easy to explain the general concept in the scope of an interview), and is also practical (used in BigTable/HBase amongst many other places).