No article on this book is complete without praising the . These are Java applets (which you can still run via JDK's appletviewer or modern web browser plugins) that provide real-time visualization.

The reason the 2nd edition endures is simple: Data structures don't change. A linked list in 1998 behaves identically to a linked list in 2026. Binary search still runs in O(log N). A Red-Black tree still rotates the same way.

It is 800+ pages. But Lafore writes in plain English, not academic jargon. Each chapter builds incrementally, and code listings are generously annotated.