Robert Love

The key to a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms is not an exhaustive survey of every conceivable data structure and its subforms, with memorization of each's Big-O value and amortized cost.

Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.