Typical algorithms and data structures textbooks are seven or eight hundred pages long, include chapters about software engineering and the programming language used in the book, and include appendices with yet more information about the programming language. Often they include lengthy case studies with tens of pages of specifications and code. Frequently they are hardcover books printed in two colors; sometimes they have sidebars with various sorts of supplementary material. All of these characteristics make these textbooks very expensive (and very heavy), but in my experience, relatively few students take advantage of the bulk of this material and few appreciate these books’ many features: much of.
