Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions

While this book is meant for interview practice, I would recommend you still read it just for fun if you're into algorithms. I've always believed that there's no "crack" to coding interviews; it's just a matter of whether you can code or not (well, at least at those sane companies not filling up school buses with golf balls). And that requires practice. Lots of practice. Which is why I spent all my free time working out problems on Hackerrank. For me, this went well . . . for a while. But there comes a point at which you get stuck. I remember working on some hackerrank problems in the medium to hard difficulty which I would not be able to proceed for weeks and weeks. No amount of googling for information, discussion boards or stack overflow threads paint a complete picture to help you when you're stuck. After countless such occasions and failing a few interviews, I gave in and bought this book. After all it was $20 - the cost of an uber to work. Now, I wish I had bought this sooner! Within reading the first two chapters I've already learnt so much about how to think about coding problems. There's also a nice collections of custom data structures at the end of the book. I've swiped some data structures straight out of this book and use them in my day-to-day life too. Gayle has done a tremendous job of using words to explain how that weird gooey gel inside your head moves like when problem-solving. She deconstructs every approach to tackle a problem into atomic pieces. She goes into great depth about alternative designs, tradeoffs and runtime complexity. She talks about visualizing recursive calls as trees, thinking about BUD*, amortized analysis of ArrayList and much more. The great thing is that Gayle goes into copious amounts of details for each solution - she talks about how to start from a brute force solutions and optimize each component one-by-one and talks about tradeoffs in approaches. Overall, I think this a very helpful book. I would recommend you begin reading this book immediately after your first course on Algorithms. It will certainly help drill down the concepts and help strengthen your fundamentals. *BUD is a special term the author uses to describe strategies to optimize solutions

Since the first edition, I've recommended Cracking the Coding Interview to people preparing for technical interviews. Gayle has a depth and breadth of knowledge that she shares freely in this book. She means what she says too: she's not a recruiter, or a sourcer, or affiliated with any of those groups -- she's an engineer who knows what it takes to be prepared for and ace a technical job interview. Full disclaimer: I worked with Gayle at Google, and I know her -- and back in the day I even saw her code. Forearmed with this additional information on how she works, I can say that she really knows her stuff here. There's a reason why multiple companies recommend this book to prospective candidates to prepare. It's not a cookbook, you can't just learn the examples rote and then ace an interview. For one thing: hiring managers like me know about the book, and we're not going to let our teams ask exactly these questions. However, by working through the examples in the book, you will gain an understanding and refresh your software engineering knowledge to a level where any algorithm, design or coding question that is thrown at you will be answerable. By following and solving the examples in this book, you'll refresh your memory on how to approach these problems. You'll make mistakes, and be more comfortable with making those mistakes and then moving past them. You'll get some insight into how you approach problems and potential pitfalls in your methodology. There are incredibly useful tips on how to describe your solutions, how to work through a coding question, and how to answer some more thorny behavioral questions. The 6th edition, with its additional 50+ questions, expanded solutions and explanations of the tech hiring process will put you in a good position to do your best in your job interview. As a hiring manager, I want you to do your best. The better you are prepared, the less nervous you'll be when you interview, and the better you'll perform. This book is an indispensable part of your interview preparation.

Best book I ever bought. I'm fairly certain the interview preparation guide and sample coding questions gave me the edge I needed to get through a recent, grueling coding interview emerging to be described by my recruiter and the clients as the "best candidate they'd seen in weeks". I was inspired to buy the book and learn from it after having made it all the way to the final phase of a long multi-test interview process with another company. What I lacked was the ability to resist the urge to panic and the confidence to do what I needed to succeed in a time-pressured whiteboard question. Although my portfolio was great and my personality evaluations very positive, with my terrible whiteboard performance I left those fine people with the impression I didn't know my head from my you know what. I found that the book's instructions were very helpful in providing a blueprint in how to slow down and think methodically and as a result I'm not just better at interviews, but a better coder overall I believe. By no means am I finished absorbing all the wisdom from this book, but I've already reaped immeasurable reward from just one short dedicated week studying it. Finally, while certainly this book cannot take you from 0 to 60 or replace a lack of portfolio, it will help polish experienced coders, especially the self-taught, maybe who need a little help communicating their ideas or tackling the kind of problems that are current interview fodder, which as we all know can be quite alien from the comfort zones of our specialties. Although, pure beginners may also get some value out of this as a learning checklist for being able to do the minimum of what the industry now expects developers to know well. Just buy the book!

Livro excelente.

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The perfect choice to land your next programming job, all the text, diagrams and code printed are readable and very easy to follow.

This is a really good book. It has a lot of really good problems, amazing career advice, and just a lot of worthwhile content for the price. My favourite thing about this book is how it explains how you should get in the habit of being able to do the same problem different ways or look at it at a different angle. Sure, you might be able to write a one line hack that solves a problem quickly and very efficiently, but what if you had to solve it another way, using a much more unconventional approach? Personally I'm working towards being a sysadmin/database admin and programming isn't the main focus of my education but the more I use it the more I can see it being a required skill for employment as I approach my now graduating year. Also this book has motivated me to learn Java much better. Anyway aside from all the great programming advice, it also offers some really nice insights into the hiring process of very high end tech companies and also things you should do to improve your chance of being hired.. and I can tell you it doesn't always come down to how well you can solve complex problems.

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