Hi, I'm the author. For those who haven't heard about the book yet: it is a practical description of the main data structures and algorithms in use today. The book is also featuring a presentation of the most important algorithm development techniques, as well a examples of the real-world use cases in each chapter. It uses Common Lisp as an implementation language, and also contains a crash course into the language i…
As a second year cs student currently taking an algorithms course with no experience with LISP, would this book be useful for me?
In the preface, I discuss a bit the topic of how algorithms are taught in the universities versus how they are actually used. I made a choice to lean heavily towards the "practical" approach. So, from the perspective of a student, this shouldn't be your principal manual, the theory isn't presented in the best possible way, to say the least. (As a manual I'd recommend Skiena, or you can use Cormen etc.) But if you read the book as supplementary material it can give you a different perspective on those theoretical concepts and, hopefully, you'll get more value from studying them as you'll see where it all leads and how you might be using the obtained knowledge in your further work.
As for Lisp, I don't think that picking it for any smart student should be a problem.