Old school would be Wirth; he's done several data structures books. That's where a lot of the fundamentals got laid down. Hard core is Knuths' "The Art of Com

Old school would be Wirth; he's done several data structures books. That's where a lot of the fundamentals got laid down. Hard core is Knuths' "The Art of Computer Programming", but tackling it is somewhat akin to asking how to tell time and being shown, in exquisite (or excruciating) detail how to build a clock. I think I learned the most/fastest from Sedgewick (Intro to the Analysis or Algorithms, Algorithms in C (or C++ or Java)). His style worked for me; YMMV. The book Rivest, Cormen, et. al wrote (Intro to Algorithms) is also very good, as is the Aho algorithms book.