This is a very old classic that was used over twenty years ago to teach the "bread and butter" algorithms for solving hard problems. I am sure the same topics are covered today in other texts using more up-to-date languages (e.g Java) and notation. My copy is well worn having created algorithms to solve games using "Divide-and-Conquer", "Greedy Method", "Dynamic Programming" etc. This book is probably useful as a collector's item ...buy a more up-to-date book if you are lookging to teach yourself "backtracking" or other algorithms. I just wanted to review in order to state how many problems I solved using the algorithms in this book.