Ask HN: Favorite algorithms book

I would recommend "The Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena.

What I believe this book provides that CLRS does not is a series of succinct descriptions of common algorithms AND brief explanations of where you would most likely find those algorithms to be near optimal solutions.

Skiena's book does not provide a detailed theoretical analysis of each algorithm like CLRS does, nor does it include particularly exotic data structures and algorithms you'd find in journal papers. What Skiena does provide along with each algorithm is a series of references which do provide a lot of this additional background information that you could independently find if you need a more detailed look at a topic.

As a bonus the book also includes a series of "War Stories" describing how some of the algorithms solved specific real world problems. They're an amusing break from the rest of the book if you're trying to read it cover to cover rather than just as a reference.

In my opinion CLRS is too verbose and formal, unless you are a complete beginner. I don't know Sedgewick's book. I can recommend Kleinberg/Tardos, Dasgupta/Papadimitriou/Vazirani and Manber's "Introduction to algorithms: a creative approach".

I have been reading Adam Drozdek's book : Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ and I like it, though I have had to read up on C++ which I do not know that well (the algorithms in the book are implemented in C++).