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

amazing book , helped me to get a job as a software engineer

Better than I expected. Thank you

The main reason I bought the book is that it closely reflects the status quo of the technical interviews in large tech companies. You probably can do 1000 problems on leetcode in several months and achieve better results. But this book can be done in maybe half of the time and yet does a decent sampling of the typical problems. I have both the 5th edition and the 6th edition. I bought 2 editions because the 6th edition has more problems and is better organized. Four stars instead of five for two reasons. First is about what the book is promoting. The current interview process is far from being perfect. For many of the problems, unless you know the solutions beforehand, there is no way you can code up a decent one within an hour. Some of the problems were even research subjects for years before an optimal solution was found. The book mentions an example, a good candidate whom the author knows very well but just cannot pass the coding interviews. As the author explains, large tech companies can afford false negatives. How to fix the problem? Read the book back and forth and do the problems several times. Then a candidate will greatly increase the chance of landing a good job. But the question is: Will anyone who aces on interview problems necessarily perform well on the job? Will this person necessarily be a good engineer? I do not know. There are definitely false positives too. I am guessing the assumption is that the coding problems we do nowadays on the interviews somehow achieve minimal number of false positives. But I doubt there are actually numbers supporting that claim. The second reason for a star less is the lack of rigorousness. Some of the problems are presented unclear. I have to go to the solution part to figure out what a problem actually means. Some of the solutions are not straightforward. For example, there is a problem calls for topological sort. However, none of the solutions given uses breadth-first search. Why? Some of the solutions have wrong analysis. For example, the subtree checking problem. One solution reduces the problem to checking for substrings. The Java method is String.indexOf(). The author claims the time complexity is O(m+n), which I believe for Java is actually O(mn). Overall this is good book for preparing for coding interviews. A bit disappointed about what has become of the technical interviews nowadays.

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!

Cracking the Coding Interview contains tons of problems for solving with full coded solutions in the back of the book. The focus is on the problems themselves and techniques for solving interview questions. There is still about 100 pages at the beginning about how companies work and what to do at an interview. This applies mostly to companies in Silicon Valley and primarly at major tech companies such as Google. What make the problems so interesting is that there are many different solutions to the same problem. Some of the times I thought I had an optimal solution, and looked at the answer to find out there were a couple better solutions. Other times I would have a solution that was not listed but was of the same running time. Many times I was not able to get the answer and these problems will be difficult for even the most experienced computer scientist. The material covers basically what a good university program should teach you. It focuses on algorithm knowledge, although there are chapters with problems about OOP, and the Java language. Most of the solutions are programmed in Java given in the back. A lot of thought was put in how to structure this book. There are hints for each problem. This is used to simulate the interview environment where if you got stuck you should ask questions and hopefully the interviewer will give you a hint. The hints are not near the answers section so you are not tempted to glance at the answer first. Just a warning, this is a problem solving book. If you not interested in trying the problems you will not like this book.

I was never a smart student in the classroom. However, I was lucky to get selected to the best Engineering college in the country, where only top 300 maths stream students from the whole country yearly get selected to the national University Program. I passed out in 2006, but was not selected to the CSE program, because only the smarted 50 was chosen. Since then I never thought I will ever learn programming, or I could never work in the lucrative Software Field. However later after the Uni, I developed an interest in learning Programming for my Living, and since then I kept learning ever since, failing at some places, never giving up, growing up with some confidence...But was a tough Journey. Trying many courses, working every day after hours, for 11 years continuously working hard generally more than 12 hours at average on this field, and Have read, and followed a lot of books, nothing truly makes me confident. I realized, somewhere I have missed some fundamentals, some patterns of thinking, which kept me scared and unconfident, keeping a doubt about my fundamental expertise, in a far unrecognize place of my heart. Recently I got an interview call to work as a Google Contractor, which really impressed me. Again I found out, getting my self-prepared for such a challenge, I am not yet ready. I was feeling, I am missing some way of thinking. I got an Amazon interview. One of my friends recommend me this book, But by that I have already read, enough about the feedback for the book. I have my second interview for Amazon today, in other few hours. I am still not confident about Programming because I could not stay enough with the Book. However, I already have the feeling that this book is the most enlightening book, if you are like me, not very confident, not very super smart and still are planning to crack a coding interview with some smart answers. The book has extraordinarily smart real-world example solutions to some well-known/well-unknown interview questions, without which an average ordinary hardworking brain like of mine (not a college superstar nerd), could not imagine alone. Thank you, Gayle Laakmann McDowell. She is a Genious.

Livro excelente.

Good book if you are preparing for placements

iyi paketleme güzel ürün

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.