Does Skiena's book contain solutions to the problems? I love reading Cormen but iirc there are no solutions to the problems. Programming Pearls is awesome too... there are solutions to many of the problems (but not all). Ironically the most helpful book I've read is Programming Interviews Exposed. This book contains solutions that are explained very thoroughly.
In a way - I read Programming Interviews Exposed, and it definitely helped to brush up on implementation details, but Skiena offers more of a cookbook approach to tackling algorithmically hard problems. The second half is full of generalized problems, as well as the potential approaches to solving them using the concepts introduced earlier. While this might not be as used on an interview (since the problems may be a little too involved), I think it's definitely much more valuable for actually solving problems.
