Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions 5th Revised & enlarged Edition

If you are thinking about starting prep for interviews and dont know where to start, buy this book. I was working for some years at a company and out of touch with algorithms. Then when I wanted to give interviews I bought this book first thing. This books certainly covers the questions you need to know but assumes you know the concepts. This is where I was stuck so I stopped halfway and started on Skiena's youtube lectures his "The Algorithm Design Manual" book. Once I was done with the book I came back and completed this. The problems and solutions made more sense that way. I did not have time to complete the medium and hard problems in the end and some problems/chapters might not be relevant for all interviews so you could skip them. Also some solutions are not the best/easy to follow. So compare the solution with that given in other great resources mentioned below.Here is my suggestion for prep:1. Start with Skiena's lectures on youtube or "The Algorithm Design Manual" book. Even if you dont have time for war stories or the questions in the second half of the book, that's fine. You should know the contents in the first half of the book.2. Continue with this book. Feel free to skip some questions and come back later.3. Further you may read "Elements of Programming Interviews". It is not the easiest to start with but once you are familiar with the concepts from 1 and 2 this is great reference. Some problems might be repetitive but they have a concise way of implementing the solutions.Work out problems from geeksforgeeks.com and leetcode.com There are a whole variety of problems not even discussed in the above resources which are solved there. Dont refer to careercup website for solutions, they are just some random thoughts and people showing off their coding skills.Apart from that you should be strong in your language of choice and know its concepts. All this takes time so dont rush. Give yourself 2-3 months to familiarize and read the concepts and algorithms. Then read the above books again and again. All successful people did lot of hard work behind the scenes. They got into top companies since they put the hard work not because they got some free pass because they studied in top tier school. And that is the reason Gayle wrote this book, so with hard work and luck anyone can aim high. I thank her for that.Side note. I was never asked a question directly from this book in most interviews. What they usually ask is some flavor of questions in this book. That's why you need to know the concepts rather than memorizing the solution. This book gave me the confidence to tackle similar questions and covered a wide breadth of questions so I didn't have to wonder what to study. All the best.

Does it have everything I need to know before my interview?NoShould I still buy it?Yes! Most definitely yes!This book has excellent tips and tricks to solve a specific set of problems that are pretty common during an interview especially when you are looking for a technical job right out of school. If this book teaches you absolutely nothing, it still gives you a sense of confidence in knowing and identifying patterns in questions and teaches you ways to think about them under a time constraint.Every software engineer knows that it's one thing to excel at school and at work and a whole other challenge to think of a solution and code it under a 30 minute time constraint. Even if you are the best programmer in the world, interviews can be difficult due to their (sometimes irrational) methods of judging a candidate in a short amount of time.What is it good at?This book is excellent at giving you a little bit of everything without overwhelming you with too much information. It contains ~10 questions for every major topic (Binary trees, Graphs, Recursion, Dynamic Programming, OOP) and walks you through the solutions briefly. It's not a very difficult read and doesn't have a very textbooky feel to it which makes it easy to skim through before an interview.What is it not?Like I said earlier, it is NOT an all encompassing book which is by any means ENOUGH before say a Google interview. Yes some companies have slightly easier(to be read as different) interviewing processes which may deem this book as sufficient material, but a lot of the major companies require more preparation than just this one book. This book does NOT teach you the fundamentals. It is not a textbook and does not go through different types of algorithms and data structures from a theoretical point of view. It is more of a tips and tricks kind of book rather than a formal way to learn the basics of programming.What language does it use?Java. It is all Java. Although due to the nature of Java, it is pretty readable by anyone proficient in any programming language. Although I must say that C users might have to make considerable changes to the solution(add loads more code) to make it work since the solution relies on some functionality that C lacks.In conclusion, this book is not comprehensive but definitely essential for students. If you are a student looking for your first job, buy this book to get yourself started on the job search. Good luck! :)