Help a college student

/prog/ I don't understand data structures very well and I have a test next week that will either make me or break me. I am usually a star student but something about me/data structures/teacher isn't right. I pay attention in class and take pages and pages of notes and every night I read the related material for at least 1-2.5 hours each and every night although I still find myself lost. Please give me advice on how I can better understand this subject.

Well, for me it was
   -Dead on sharp, experienced professors when I was an
    undergradute. These guys were in their 50s and 60s and
    had their explanations perfected after decades of teaching.
    They instantly assessed your intelligence and tailored the
    explanation to you. Nowadays, profs are 27 year old
    Pakis and Afrikkaners doing teaching as a temp job,
    so tough luck.

   -A pretty good algorithms book. All I remember is what it
    looked like: mustard yellow, 3 inches thick, and small print
    to fit in all the information and examples. I don't have
    it now because the data structures/algorithms I need are
    in libraries. I couldn't code a quicksort or Gaussian
    Elimination now to save my life, but I was master of them
    when I took my exams.   

   -Unix man pages. I grep'd them for keywords a lot when I
    started out.

   -Brian Kernighan has a Zen approach to book writing and
    programming. K&R C book was clear and concise and set the
    programming standard for many people. Kernighan's HOC
    calculator helped many people get started in interpreters
    and compilers.

   -Nowadays my starting points are wikipedia, then
    directory.fsf.org, then sourceforge.net, then google.
    I'm lying a little because I don't want the spammers in here
    screwing up my real favorite coding web site.

In general, remember that 90% of everything is crap, and
you just have to keep searching until you find non-crap. That
goes for text books, /prog/ replies, data structure tutorials on the web, and your own code. So start visiting University book stores and browsing the text books until you find explanations that are clear to you.