Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions
Now in the 5th edition, Cracking the Coding Interview gives you the interview preparation you need to get the top software developer jobs. This is a deeply technical book and focuses on the software engineering skills to ace your interview. The book is over 500 pages and includes 150 programming interview questions and answers, as well as other advice.
The full list of topics are as follows:
The Interview Process
This section offers an overview on questions are selected and how you will be evaluated. What happens when you get a question wrong? When should you start preparing, and how? What language should you use? All these questions and more are answered.
Behind the Scenes
Learn what happens behind the scenes during your interview, how decisions really get made, who you interview with, and what they ask you. Companies covered include Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.
Special Situations
This section explains the process for experience candidates, Program Managers, Dev Managers, Testers / SDETs, and more. Learn what your interviewers are looking for and how much code you need to know.
Before the Interview
In order to ace the interview, you first need to get an interview. This section describes what a software engineer’s resume should look like and what you should be doing well before your interview.
Behavioral Preparation
Although most of a software engineering interview will be technical, behavioral questions matter too. This section covers how to prepare for behavioral questions and how to give strong, structured responses.
Technical Questions (+ 5 Algorithm Approaches)
This section covers how to prepare for technical questions (without wasting your time) and teaches actionable ways to solve the trickiest algorithm problems. It also teaches you what exactly “good coding” is when it comes to an interview.
150 Programming Questions and Answers
This section forms the bulk of the book. Each section opens with a discussion of the core knowledge and strategies to tackle this type of question, diving into exactly how you break down and solve it. Topics covered include
- Arrays and Strings
- Linked Lists
- Stacks and Queues
- Trees and Graphs
- Bit Manipulation
- Brain Teasers
- Mathematics and Probability
- Object-Oriented Design
- Recursion and Dynamic Programming
- Sorting and Searching
- Scalability and Memory Limits
- Testing
- C and C++
- Java
- Databases
- Threads and Locks
For the widest degree of readability, the solutions are almost entirely written with Java (with the exception of C / C++ questions). A link is provided with the book so that you can download, compile, and play with the solutions yourself.
Changes from the Fourth Edition: The fifth edition includes over 200 pages of new content, bringing the book from 300 pages to over 500 pages. Major revisions were done to almost every solution, including a number of alternate solutions added. The introductory chapters were massively expanded, as were the opening of each of the chapters under Technical Questions. In addition, 24 new questions were added.
Cracking the Coding Interview, Fifth Edition is the most expansive, detailed guide on how to ace your software development / programming interviews.
List Price: $ 39.95
Price: $ 32.33
I have 2 words for you, BUY it.,
Why are you even reading these reviews I ask? Just buy it. It’s an investment and the return on investment is plenty-fold.
This book has detailed explanations on every single problem and the collection of problems is awesome. This should adequately prepare you for your tech interviews, right from explaining about the process, methods that you need to employ, skills that you should develop and most importantly has a wide range of topics covered in the interviews. It’s not for those who start algorithms or data structures with a clean slate. It’s for fine tuning your problem solving skills for interviews. But it’s good to get one even if you are just beginning, to help you in the learning process.
For those who have version 4 (I have), you should buy it. Explanations are very detailed and it helps to understand the problems really well. And 24 new problems have been added.
For those who downloaded pirated v4 PDFs (if you are reading), seriously, gift this to someone if you have got your dream-job already or buy one for yourself. You owe it to the author’s efforts.
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|Highly Recommended,
You can read other reviews to get a good sense of “what” is covered in this book and “how” well it is covered, so the question I wanted to answer with my review is “when” should you get this book?
Whether you are searching for a job or not, my answer is now.
I picked up this book while in what seemed like a good steady job and my primary interest was not to prepare for a job interview but rather to have some fun and challenge myself by working through the excellent programming questions. Things change however and that once steady job started getting progressively worse which ultimately made me decide it was time to move on. I’m especially glad therefore that I picked up this book – after taking a few months off, I’m ready to start the job hunt and I know I can walk in to any interview feeling confident I can tackle whatever comes my way.
If you are already in a steady job and happy, get this book to challenge your mind and improve your programming and logic skills. And with life and the job market being as unpredictable as it is, you might find you will need it sooner than you think!
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