For each data structure or algorithm, a brief description is provided along with its asymptotic complexity and an extensive set of references. More distinctively, an implementation in C and/or Pascal is usually provided, along with experimental results comparing the performance of these implementations on a variety of distributions.

The authors have created a very slick WWW site for the book, http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/handbook/hbook.html , containing all the source code as well as the index and table of contents. This entire site has been replicated in the local distribution site , although this copy still contains ftp links to Chile for the algorithm implementations. However, all of these files are also available locally . These files are all copyrighted © Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. Inc. Since many of the elementary data structures and sorting algorithms can be implemented concisely, most of the programs are very short. They are perhaps most useful as models, or as part of an experimental study to compare the performance on different data structures for a particular application.