The CLR "Introduction to Algorithms" would be one of the canonical answers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

The CLR "Introduction to Algorithms" would be one of the canonical answers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms It's certainly one worth having and the only book from my computer science education that I still reference frequently. In fact, I'm tempted to say that it's the last computer science book that you have to read. After that you should be able to work directly from research papers, though a topical book can sometimes be useful in other areas with fairly wide breadth.