Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions Paperback – 22 Aug. 2011

When I casually mentioned to a friend that I was interviewing for a software engineering position at XXXX, he suggested having a look at Gayle's book.My first impression was that it was a little overkill for an interview preparation, but on flipping through the book, I realized there was quite a lot of material from my Computer Science undergraduate degree that wasn't so fresh in my mind a decade after graduation. This book does a phenomenal job of refreshing all the core CS concepts that you would need for an interview at one of these big software firms. The writing style is fresh, smart, concise, and dead accurate. Gayle gives you just enough detail get started on the exercises (or to go out and dig deeper on your own), and the sample problems are really well written -- just the style you might get in a 1 hour coding interview. The breakdown of topics is logical and makes it easy to tackle the book section-by-section without feeling overwhelmed. Even if you are god's gift to computer programming, the "soft" sections at the beginning of the book give insight into why there's more to getting hired than just writing code on a whiteboard.Even if you don't take mine or the other reviewers' word for it, just do a quick search for the author and look at her experience. She's worked as an engineer at Microsoft, Apple, and Google (where she participated on hiring committees). Having been through so many of these interviews and helped administer them, she might be the most qualified person in the world to write a book like this.This isn't some cheap promise to magically get you hired at a big tech company just by turning a few pages. It is a beautifully-written companion that will guide you as you _work_ to refresh and hone your skills so you can be on the top of your game for the big day(s). I can not recommend this book highly enough to anyone interviewing for software engineering jobs.

Let me start by saying that this book is not for everyone. It is a book for Computer engineers.This book won't get you a job in Google or Amazon if you are not a good engineer, but if you are a good one this book will help you focus on the areas that really need your attention when facing an interview.Don't read this book from cover to cover. Do all the exercise on a whiteboard, in different languages, think about the solutions, and check other sources. I guarantee you will end up being a much better engineer.I absolutely love this book, and keep going back to it.

This is a great interview preparation book. It got my rusty coding skills up to speed with the requirements of major silicon valley firms. Using it as one of my major resources while preparing for interviews I managed to get multiple full-time software engineering offers fresh out of grad school.That said, don't expect to read the book in a week or two and ace every interview. You need to spend time on it, preferably way in advance of your interviews. Ideally, you have to have all the problems presented in your "cache" so that you can easily approach more tricky problems on the spot. Even if you only have a week to prepare, still buy this book---there is no single resource out there that is better.The book however needs improvement.-There are typos and minor errors. For a 5th version of a book this is bad.-Some answers to the book's problems lack even a basic complexity analysis. While I understand that it is not possible to explain the algorithmic complexity of some solutions without sounding like CLRS, the author should at least say that an analysis is not simple and/or give a pointer to another book.-The worst part of the book is that some answers are not well-explained. This can be improved by just spending more time editing the book. I expect to be able to understand the important ideas/steps behind a solution by just reading the text and not the code. Unfortunately, this is not always the case creating subtle surprises. My favourite example is in page 369 of the book regarding the diagonal of the array. The intro text makes you think that you fully understand the solution ("do that, then compare that with that, recurse, and you are done"). Unless, however, you read a comment in the source code of the solution provided (i.e. "do a binary search in the diagonal..."), you 'd be missing a VERY important detail. If afterwards you get asked this question in an interview without having spent time on the comment, you will fail miserably.

This book is incredibly good to prepare for interviews. The chapters include summaries and tips about what you should expect during interviews, all this matched with great exercises.I would definitely get this over Programming Interviews exposed due to the huge amount of exercises in the book, and the ease with which you can just pick it up and do a couple of exercises.I would also combine this book with some algorithm lectures or the Introduction to Algorithms book (CLRS) to have a deeper understanding of some more complex questions.

The book is very well written and exposes all the basic key points of a good technical interview preparation process. Moreover, the book is stuffed with common interview problems that are to be fully understood by candidates as similar problems might be presented in their next interview. If you're preparing for an interview, this book will help you understand what knowledge you're lacking and how to train for whiteboard problem solving exercise that are fairly common in technical interview, especially with big companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc.

This book will not instantly make you super good at interviews, but you can be guaranteed to be more confident once you've read and attempted most of the questions here. Gyle is an excellent writer and tutor.

Got a job before i really used the book, however from past interview everything you need to succeed in your first job is in this book, highly recommended.