This book is intended to teach the design and analysis of basic data structures and their implementation in an object-oriented language. In this edition, the language happens to be C++.

This book is not intended to act as an introduction to the C++ programming language. Readers of this book need only be familiar with the basic syntax of C++ and similar languages. Those wishing to work with the accompanying source code should have some experience programming in C++.

This book is also not intended as an introduction to the C++ Standard Template Library or the generic programming paradigm that the STL embodies. This book describes implementations of several different data structures, many of which are used in implementations of the STL. The contents of this book may help an STL programmer understand how some of the STL data structures are implemented and why these implementations are efficient.