DS & A in _ is a good book from Michael T. Goodrich and Roberto Tamassia More on reddit.com

Any good algorithm book will describe the algorithms in abstract terms, and not just in one particular language. Because after all, you can implement them in any language. I would recommend "Introduction to Algorithms" by CLRS (Cormen, Leierson, Rivest, Stein). The algorithms are described in pseudocode, not in any particular programming language. For example, their insertion sort is "implemented" as follows: for i = 2 to n key = A[i] // insert A[i] into the sorted subarry A[1:i - 1] j = i - 1 while j > 0 and A[j] > key A[j + 1] = A[j] j = j - 1 A[j + 1] = key You might notice that this already looks close to Python (and that their array indices are 1-based). IIRC Guido was inspired by how pseudocode looks (which is not standardized, just an ad hoc way to describe algorithms in a language neutral way); that's why there's the "Python is runnable pseudocode" memes, and stuff like this . Another popular book is "Algorithms" by Robert Sedgewick; I've never read it, but I assume the algorithms are also described in pseudocode. I've found a github repo where people implement the algorithms in Python. Of course there's also the holy bible TAOCP by Knuth, but that's more a reference for experienced people, as it is incredibly information dense and mathematical. Knuth himself said that "2 pages in my book is somebody's entire career work". More on reddit.com

High Performance Python by O'Reilly It goes under the hood for exactly what you're looking for More on reddit.com

Free is good, right? More on reddit.com