Algorithms, 4th Edition

Yes there’s lots of algorithm books! Too many to learn them all. I had an anxiety attack and bought most of the introductory algo books mentioned in CLRS chapter 1. I liked ALGS4 by Sedgewick as my introduction to Algorithms. I still refer to the Coursera course. I actually started with CLRS and doubled back to ALGS4. I wish I did it in reverse order but it was still useful reading CLRS and refreshing my math skills. I would say grab a few and see which ones you like. CLRS, ALGS4, Algorithm Design Manual, and Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardos are a good start. You can look in the bibliography of each books for more suggestions from the experts themselves.

I read Knuth's Volume 3, Searching and Sorting back in the 70's when I was a new grad student, it's great. I now own the second and latest edition of this volume, but it is now over 20 years old. I recommend all of Knuth's publications. Is Search and Sorting dated? Well, it is quite old. The fold out chart of tape merging patterns for different tape based sorting algorithms doesn't really come up very often anymore. It's been over 40 years since I've had to write programs that worked with mainframe tape drives. Although AVL trees are covered well, there is no coverage of red-black trees or splay-trees. Hashing is covered extensively, but there is no discussion of more modern hash table methods (like Cuckoo Hashing or Robin Hood Hashing or the power of choice results). Furthermore, the basic hardware model used by Knuth in volume 3 assumes uniform costs for memory access. Cache sensitive algorithms aren't considered in volume 3 but are very important today. Even quicksort, which I learned by studying Volume 3, now has what I consider to be a more modern treatment in Sedgewick and Wayne's Algorithms, 4th Ed.