Overall I think Mr. Loudon did an oustanding job with this book. I wish I'd had it seven or eight years ago when I was first interested in this subject. Having clear explanations and code instead of dazzling displays of calculus makes this, to my mind, the outstanding book on the topic.
Having said that, I do have several quibbles, however. With other reviewers, I found the comment style to be good for the line count but a bit overdone, but sometimes sparse on some of the more difficult sections of code.
The complexities of some operations like double hashing might have been better shown in the text source (though understandably pushing both hashing methods out to the client is a design decision). Also more comparisons between closely related algorithms (chained versus open hashing comes to mind) would have been appreciated. In some respects I think the author was hamstrung by making all the chapters symetrical in structure (but it was a good structure).
Finally, I found the makefiles somewhat poorly structured; it would have been nice to have centralized the compiler, CFLAGS etc.
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