[d-crane]

I just finished my undergrad CS algorithms course, and my professor mentioned this book, but we didn't use it. He essentially said that it contains so much material that it's rather all-encompassing as a reference book, but he definitely discouraged it as a textbook for learning as we would in a course. It sounds like you'd likely want to find something more geared towards teaching.

[jwdunne]

Thank you :) that's reassuring. What do you recommend?

[d-crane]

Well, our text for the course was Levitin's Design and Analysis of Algorithms, but I really can't speak to its quality at all - we just used the professor's own prepared information pretty much exclusively. From my brief look through the book, it looked okay, at least!