I'm glad to see more classes like this come online. I think its a bit of a shame that the material (of the book) focuses so much on Java, however. The algorithm

I'm glad to see more classes like this come online. I think its a bit of a shame that the material (of the book) focuses so much on Java, however. The algorithms classes I took in college focused a lot on math, logic and proofs. It took me a long time to understand exactly why; I thought we'd be learning L1 cache hacks and register tricks in Assembly or C. But the technology used to implement the algorithms changes a lot faster than the algorithms themselves, and the details of the best optimizations are different for just about every language. I now think it's far more important to have a solid grounding in problem decomposition and theory than it is to understand the intricacies of efficient algorithm designs for a specific language. If you feel like I do, there are two books in particular that come to mind in that their content transcends the normal teaching curriculum and they both force you to think long and hard about how the authors came up with these fantastic little optimizations. I personally learned a lot from trying to reconstruct the thought process that must have led up to some of the algorithms implemented therein. The first book is called Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design, and while it focuses on implementation in Haskell, you don't need to be a functional programming expert to get a lot out of the book. The second book is called Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures, and while the name might scare some away, it has a lot of interesting algorithms and accompanying research paper references so you can go off and explore. It took me several years to make my way through it completely, but I have gained a much better understanding of algorithms (and data structures!) that deal with more complex topics (such as computer vision). There's one book I'd like to call out, as well. Introduction to Algorithms could be so much better than it is. It has all the right ingredients for a fantastic introduction to algorithms, but the way its written had most people in my algorithms class, myself included, bored beyond belief. Just my 2 cents.