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Programming Interviews Exposed: Coding Your Way Through the Interview
Ace technical interviews with smart preparation
Programming Interviews Exposed is the programmer’s ideal first choice for technical interview preparation. Updated to reflect changing techniques and trends, this new fourth edition provides insider guidance on the unique interview process that today's programmers face. Online coding contests are being used to screen candidate pools of thousands, take-home projects have become commonplace, and employers are even evaluating a candidate's public code repositories at GitHub—and with competition becoming increasingly fierce, programmers need to shape themselves into the ideal candidate well in advance of the interview. This book doesn't just give you a collection of questions and answers, it walks you through the process of coming up with the solution so you learn the skills and techniques to shine on whatever problems you’re given.
This edition combines a thoroughly revised basis in classic questions involving fundamental data structures and algorithms with problems and step-by-step procedures for new topics including probability, data science, statistics, and machine learning which will help you fully prepare for whatever comes your way.
Learn what the interviewer needs to hear to move you forward in the process Adopt an effective approach to phone screens with non-technical recruiters Examine common interview problems and tests with expert explanations Be ready to demonstrate your skills verbally, in contests, on GitHub, and more Technical jobs require the skillset, but you won’t get hired unless you are able to effectively and efficiently demonstrate that skillset under pressure, in competition with hundreds of others with the same background. Programming Interviews Exposed teaches you the interview skills you need to stand out as the best applicant to help you get the job you want.
Programming Interviews Exposed is the programmer’s ideal first choice for technical interview preparation. Updated to reflect changing techniques and trends, this new fourth edition provides insider guidance on the unique interview process that today's programmers face. Online coding contests are being used to screen candidate pools of thousands, take-home projects have become commonplace, and employers are even evaluating a candidate's public code repositories at GitHub—and with competition becoming increasingly fierce, programmers need to shape themselves into the ideal candidate well in advance of the interview. This book doesn't just give you a collection of questions and answers, it walks you through the process of coming up with the solution so you learn the skills and techniques to shine on whatever problems you’re given.
This edition combines a thoroughly revised basis in classic questions involving fundamental data structures and algorithms with problems and step-by-step procedures for new topics including probability, data science, statistics, and machine learning which will help you fully prepare for whatever comes your way.
Learn what the interviewer needs to hear to move you forward in the process Adopt an effective approach to phone screens with non-technical recruiters Examine common interview problems and tests with expert explanations Be ready to demonstrate your skills verbally, in contests, on GitHub, and more Technical jobs require the skillset, but you won’t get hired unless you are able to effectively and efficiently demonstrate that skillset under pressure, in competition with hundreds of others with the same background. Programming Interviews Exposed teaches you the interview skills you need to stand out as the best applicant to help you get the job you want.
384 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 28, 2018
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125 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 20, 2019
A great introductory book giving you the confidence to tackle more complex problems.
Several Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutionsbooks provide you with an extensive set of Software Engineer problems to practice on. Some website, like leetcode, even provide you with an online code editor to test your solutions and a continuous flow of new problems brought to you by fellow interviewees.
It depends.
Each chapter focuses on a specific topic (recursion, string manipulation, database…) note that it is not exhaustive, nor it is designed to be. This book is mostly about methodology.
About the content
Each topic is introduced in a few pages. The key notions are explained, and the authors underline the most remarkable properties.
After this 2 to 3 pages introduction, follows a dozen of questions. The questions listed in this book are not the hardest one, and it’s unlikely you’re going to find those questions, as is, during a real-life interview at a top company. But they are good at making sure you understand the given topic. As you go through the book, you feel that you are developing a sense of pattern recognition among different problems taxonomy.
The devil is in the details
Now the gist of the book; Each exercise is accompanied with a thoroughly detailed solution.
Very few resources (site, blog post or book) describe the complete thinking process required to go through a coding exercise as well as this book does. The authors do a remarkable job of taking you through each step of the problem resolution. Identifying potential pitfalls, you might fall in, and describing why such an approach is better than another one. Those explanations are given in an agreeable conversational style. It feels like you are discussing your solution with a friend.
The book also offers some valuable information on the interviewing process, on how to organize your job search, as well as advice for writing a great resume. Those chapters are interesting if you don’t have any other resource available, but do not especially shine by their originality.
I’d consider this book to be the best first resource one should focus on when preparing for an interview. Once you finish this book you feel more confident in your skillset to tackle real-life interviews coding questions problems.
Time considerations
This book can be covered in less than two months at a chill pace. Going at ~ 1 question a day.
This book will be the most helpful if you have a long preparation period (>4 months). Indeed, this book is only the first step. Once you read it, you might want to get hands-on experience on harder problems.
In a nutshell
- Do you feel you’re taking too much time for an easy/medium leetcode problem? The optimal solution uses a data structure you are not very familiar with? You struggle to make your thinking process explicit and prefer jumping right into the code? If any of your answer to one of the previous questions is yes, going through this book will help you prepare for your next interview.
- On the other hand, if you’re already familiar with classic algorithms and data structures, are comfortable with big-O notation for evaluating memory and run-time complexity and are used to communicate over your implementation choice; this book won’t bring you much. You might be better off practicing interview question.
Several Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutionsbooks provide you with an extensive set of Software Engineer problems to practice on. Some website, like leetcode, even provide you with an online code editor to test your solutions and a continuous flow of new problems brought to you by fellow interviewees.
> In this context, is this book worth it?
It depends.
Each chapter focuses on a specific topic (recursion, string manipulation, database…) note that it is not exhaustive, nor it is designed to be. This book is mostly about methodology.
About the content
Each topic is introduced in a few pages. The key notions are explained, and the authors underline the most remarkable properties.
After this 2 to 3 pages introduction, follows a dozen of questions. The questions listed in this book are not the hardest one, and it’s unlikely you’re going to find those questions, as is, during a real-life interview at a top company. But they are good at making sure you understand the given topic. As you go through the book, you feel that you are developing a sense of pattern recognition among different problems taxonomy.
The devil is in the details
Now the gist of the book; Each exercise is accompanied with a thoroughly detailed solution.
Very few resources (site, blog post or book) describe the complete thinking process required to go through a coding exercise as well as this book does. The authors do a remarkable job of taking you through each step of the problem resolution. Identifying potential pitfalls, you might fall in, and describing why such an approach is better than another one. Those explanations are given in an agreeable conversational style. It feels like you are discussing your solution with a friend.
The book also offers some valuable information on the interviewing process, on how to organize your job search, as well as advice for writing a great resume. Those chapters are interesting if you don’t have any other resource available, but do not especially shine by their originality.
I’d consider this book to be the best first resource one should focus on when preparing for an interview. Once you finish this book you feel more confident in your skillset to tackle real-life interviews coding questions problems.
Time considerations
This book can be covered in less than two months at a chill pace. Going at ~ 1 question a day.
This book will be the most helpful if you have a long preparation period (>4 months). Indeed, this book is only the first step. Once you read it, you might want to get hands-on experience on harder problems.
In a nutshell
- Do you feel you’re taking too much time for an easy/medium leetcode problem? The optimal solution uses a data structure you are not very familiar with? You struggle to make your thinking process explicit and prefer jumping right into the code? If any of your answer to one of the previous questions is yes, going through this book will help you prepare for your next interview.
- On the other hand, if you’re already familiar with classic algorithms and data structures, are comfortable with big-O notation for evaluating memory and run-time complexity and are used to communicate over your implementation choice; this book won’t bring you much. You might be better off practicing interview question.
September 4, 2019
I'm going to tell you a secret: this book is not fun or exciting to read, but it will give you the great overview you NEED before technical interviews. Written in a way that is accessible for both college graduate and experienced hires, Mongan does us all the favor of condensing four years of undergraduate Computer Science combined with the other sometimes strange pieces of knowledge required in the interview world into a relatively small number of pages. I personally did not work through the problems in this book and instead relied on online services such as leetcode for coding practice. If you're starting to prepare for interviews, good luck! You're starting in the right place. I also recommend the infamous Cracking The Coding Interview. Both are valuable, and I appreciated the dual perspectives while preparing.
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September 21, 2018650.144 M743 2018
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews