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Advanced Data Structures?
mdf356 asks: "It's been 5 years since I left graduate school and started designing and writing software for a living. After 5 years of writing operating systems code, I feel like I've forgotten some of the more advanced data structures I used to know. The next time an interesting problem arises, I'd like to have more in my toolbox than hashes, linked lists, heaps and various binary and n-way trees. I'd like something short and sweet, more in the line of the standard C book. Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardos looks likely to be too basic, but I haven't read it (I'd like to avoid paying $90 for something that won't meet my needs). CLR is far too large and almost exclusively covers basic territory. Tarjan's Data Structures book looks like it has potential, but seems focused on network algorithms, which are unlikely to be applicable to the kernel programming I do. What are some good reference books on more advanced data structures and algorithms, particularly ones with potential applicability to an operating systems kernel?"
Linked lists are not necessarily a poor choice for a data structure. The cost of adding and removing elements from a balanced binary tree is completely wasted when you only need to add or remove from the beginning or end of a list. A linked list is a perfect data structure for a fifo or deque. All data structures have their advantages and disadvantages; your choice should depend entirely on your requirements.
Data Structures and Algorithms (ISBN 0201000237) by Aho, Ullman and Hopcroft is a classic that belongs on every programmer's bookshelf (hell, keep it on your desk!).
"Lisp uses only nested linked lists, that can be interpreted as binary trees."
As much as people keep saying it, this is totally false... Common Lisp does not even have lists as an intrinsic type. What it does have are cons cells, several kinds of numbers, symbols, characters, strings, several kinds of vectors and arrays, hash tables, structures, instances, and lexical closures among other types native to the language.
Lists are to Lisp what Strings are to C: a convention built upon more basic structures. In the case of C, a string is a convention built up on null terminated arrays of characters. In the case of Lisp, a list is a series of chained together cons cells.