[kenjackson]

I'd actually recommend not reading Chris's book in isolation. There are a lot of things that are ugly to do in functional languages (w/ respect to data structures), but are easy with assignment (and of course vice-versa). I'd read Chris's book with Sedgewick (Sedgewick is a super applied algorithms text). This will help give a good balance.

[silentbicycle]

I partially suggested it because it uses SML for the code. Even if one doesn't use OCaml / SML for actual programming, using the notation will probably help quite a bit with reasoning about data structures.