I read Skiena's book as preparation for interviews after having gone through a course using CLRS the year before, and I definitely feel like that is the best way to do it. I feel like reading Skiena got me back to mostly the same place I was last year after being waist-deep in CLRS, but I do feel that a more thorough examination of algorithms is needed to really grasp a lot of the nuances. it's perfect for dusting off the cobwebs though!
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.
