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copied!<p>There are pluses and minuses to learning about algorithms and data structures in a language-specific way. On the plus side, the examples, exercises, and explanations can be very concrete. Provided you have access to an execution environment for that language, you can experiment on your own with the concepts as you are learning them. This is very powerful.</p> <p>On the minus side, it is harder to distinguish between the core concepts (e.g., nodes and links in a tree) and the language-specific methods for implementing them (e.g., structs and pointers in C). Other languages may be so different (e.g., Prolog), that the core concepts may be totally unrecognizable if you haven't learned how to separate them from the language-specific aspects of what you have learned. There's also the problem that there are usually lots of language-specific stuff that are entirely a distraction from the core concepts. (malloc/free in C; constructors and destructors in C++, etc., -- unless you're studying memory management algorithms.)</p> <p>One way to have the benefits of a language-specific presentation and also address its shortcomings is to study the same material presented for two radically different languages. The entire family of Algol-like languages (C, C++, Pascal, Algol, Java, C#, etc.) are basically equivalent for this purpose. I mentioned Prolog before; you might also consider Lisp. Another interesting approach might be a 4GL language like SQL. If you can implement a good balanced tree in a C program and also in an SQL schema and set of queries, then you can be confident that you have mastered the underlying concepts involved in balanced trees.</p>

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