acknowledgments we have depended greatly upon the contributions of many individuals as part of the development of this book we begin by acknowledging the wonderful team at wiley we are grateful to our editorbeth golubfor her enthusiastic support of this projectfrom beginning to end the efforts of elizabeth mills and katherine willis were critical in keeping the project movingfrom its early stages as an initial proposalthrough the extensive peer review process we greatly appreciate the attention to detail demonstrated by julie kennedythe copyeditor for this book finallymany thanks are due to joyce poh for managing the final months of the production process we are truly indebted to the outside reviewers and readers for their copious commentsemailsand constructive criticismwhich were extremely useful in writing this edition we therefore thank the following reviewers for their comments and suggestionsclaude anderson (rose hulman institute of technology)alistair campbell (hamilton college)barry cohen (new jersey institute of technology)robert franks (central college)andrew harrington (loyola university chicago)dave musicant (carleton college)and victor norman (calvin collegewe wish to particularly acknowledge claude for going above and beyond the call of dutyproviding us with an enumeration of detailed corrections or suggestions we thank david mountof university of marylandfor graciously sharing the wisdom gained from his experience with the +version of this text we are grateful to erin chambers and david letscherof saint louis universityfor their intangible contributions during many hallway conversations about the teaching of data structuresand to david for comments on early versions of the python code base for this book we thank david zampinoa student at loyola university chicagofor his feedback while using draft of this book during an independent study courseand to andrew harrington for supervising david' studies we also wish to reiterate our thanks to the many research collaborators and teaching assistants whose feedback shaped the previous java and +versions of this material the benefits of those contributions carry forward to this book finallywe would like to warmly thank susan goldwasserisabel cruzkaren goodrichgiuseppe di battistafranco preparataioannis tollisand our parents for providing adviceencouragementand support at various stages of the preparation of this bookand calista and maya goldwasser for offering their advice regarding the artistic merits of many illustrations more importantlywe thank all of these people for reminding us that there are things in life beyond writing books michael goodrich roberto tamassia michael goldwasser