Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job [Paperback]

John Mongan (Author), Noah Kindler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0471383562 | ISBN-13: 978-0471383567

Everything you need to know to survive the programmer's interview and get the job you wantWhether you are a veteran programmer seeking a new position, or a whiz-kid starting your first job search, interviewing for a programming job requires special preparation. The interviewer will present you with several challenging programming problems, and give you an hour or so to find the most elegant and economical solutions while being watched the entire time. This helpful guide will give you the tools necessary to breeze through the test and make a lasting impression that will land you the job! Readers will learn how to ask effective questions, how to decide what language to code in, and how to choose the best approach to solving a problem. Included are 50 interview problems and in-depth analysis of the possible solutions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Although designed for computer science undergraduates, this odd but intriguing book will find a broader readership because of its interesting discussion of problems and solutions. The author, both veteran programmers, based this work on questions they were asked during interviews with big league companies. About 22 pages cover social etiquette and dress and about 220 pages deal with solving programming queries that interviewers pose, from linked lists and tree navigation to sorting and recursion; highly recommended for all college, university, and large public libraries.

From the Back Cover

Everything you need to know to succeed in the programming interview and get the job you want Whether you are a veteran programmer seeking a new position or a whiz kid starting your career, interviewing for a programming job requires special preparation. The interview is likely to consist of an hour-long interactive oral exam in computers, programming, and logic. This helpful guide will give you the tools necessary to breeze through the test and make a lasting impression that will get you a top-dollar offer!

Mongan and Suojanen take you step-by-step through the same problems that they were asked on technical interviews. These veterans use their experience with the technical interview process to prepare you for any situation. With their help, you’ll gain critical interviewing skills such as how to ask effective questions, how to best approach a problem, and what to do when you get stuck. Integrated throughout the book are problems

taken from real interviews at top computer companies, followed by an in-depth analysis and explanation of the thought process leading to solutions. By focusing on techniques and not just answers, you’ll be able to apply what you learn to the wide variety of problems you will face during an interview. The problems included in this book will challenge your programming skills and help you ace the programming interview! Problem types include:

• Programming problems with emphasis on data structures and recursion
• Logic puzzles, counting and measuring problems, and spatial reasoning
• Knowledge-based problems that cover today’s most important technologies

Visit our Web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks/

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Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (May 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471383562
• ISBN-13: 978-0471383567
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #605,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #34 in Books > Business & Investing > Job Hunting & Careers > Interviewing

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

183 of 190 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful if studied correctly - one of the few helpful books you'll find on programming interviews April 22, 2006

By John H. Kaplan

Format:Paperback

I just finished rereading this book, and read the earlier Amazon interviews. Though I agree with many of the observations in the other reviews, their judgments are mostly too extreme. This book is definitely of value, but reading it won't unlock the keys to any secret kingdom of guaranteed job-landing success.

I've been interviewing and hiring software developers for almost 15 years, and I know one thing you can be sure about software interview processes: their inconsistency. Interviewing and hiring practices for software development are all over the map. As a matter of fact, all software development practices are all over the map, and how you are judged a success or failure once you land a job are at least as subjective and error-prone as how you are evaluated in interviews.

Landing a particular software development job and being successful at it once you get it require a lot of learning about the particular mix of priorities and practices on each particular team, and fitting into that mix. You could be interviewing with a sixty-year-old toy manufacturing veteran doing tiny embedded systems, and any mention of object-oriented technology could be immediate grounds for a religious no-hire. On the other hand, you could be interviewing with a young hotshot at a new Silicon Valley startup. In this case you'd not only better be fluent with every aspect of object-oriented technology, best practices, and the latest open-source frameworks, but you'd better not make too much of space optimizations or "the overhead of a subroutine call" or you'll be branded as hopelessly old fashioned....

Consequently, the advice in this book is quite valuable about communicating throughout the interview, telling the interviewer the thoughts behind what you are doing and asking clarifying questions as you go. No book by itself can help you with any interview you might encounter. However, with all its flaws, this book does a better job than any other available book in discussing programming questions, how to approach them, and possible answers. The idea that only "recent grads" are ever asked general programming questions like this is hogwash. I hire veteran developers for high-end product development jobs almost exclusively, and I ask programming questions like the ones in this book all the time, and so do most of the good interviewers I know. I've found over the years that programming questions give me among the most direct and accurate assessments of a developer's skills. Asking programming questions is enough of a best practice that you should be suspicious of a technology company that doesn't include them in its interview process. (Hey, I said that development practices were all over the map, but I didn't say that most of them were any good. How else could the software industry achieve its miserable 40% success rate?)

As far as the books weaknesses, probably the biggest is that almost all the questions, answers, and discussion are in straight procedural C. It's hard to reason why this book shows such a lack of emphasis on object-oriented technology considering it had been the state of the art for 10 years when this book was published in 2000. So, though there are a few small examples of OO class designs thrown in, discussion is missing of important topics like inheritance, composition, encapsulation, and structured exception handling. Even when you are programming in an OO language, however, the logic inside the methods you write for these kinds of general exercises is mostly the same as you would write in a procedural language. So most of this book is relevant, but you must translate to OO on your own.

A more subtle and perhaps more important weakness of this book is that topics such as performance, scalability, error handling, and public vs. internal interface design are haphazardly covered and sometimes skipped. Because of the inconsistency of development practices, there is usually no ultimate "right" answer to any of these questions. Some of the recommended "best" answers in this book have some glaring failure cases that are not covered, and covering these cases will obliterate the simplicity and performance characteristics of the "best" answer. So you always need to probe your interviewers for your constraints, such as invalid inputs, what if memory allocation fails, who are your users, etc...

Ultimately, this is a useful book. You will probably do better on a software development job interview if you read this book. Stay away from the superficial treatment most people give books such as this of just trying to memorize the questions and answers. If you read this book thoughtfully, coding and testing your own answers to the exercises as you go, and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of what's in the book, you'll definitely do better on any interview where you are asked direct coding questions. It is like learning one more person's point of view on relevant development practices, and the more you do that, the more rounded you will be and better you will do overall at both interviews and once on the job. Best of luck and I hope you find a programming job that fits you well. Read more ›

41 of 47 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars excellent advice.. December 23, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

There are many types and levels of programming jobs. This book is useful advice for people aiming for system level or hardcore type jobs e.g. embedded systems, networks and operating systems etc. For example, this book would be highly useful for you if you go for a developer's job interview in Cisco systems, IBM, Microsoft, Sun or Lucent etc. This is not too useful for application programming stuff, as one of the reviewers mentioned about Sybase etc. I have been giving programming interviews for many years and believe me, I have come across a surprising number of questions right from this book. The other good books for these type of interviews are "Expert C Programming" by Van der Linden, "Programming Pearls" and " C interfaces and Implementations" by Hansen. The interviews in companies I have mentioned do indeed last full working days, or at least five to six hours, involving lunch. The interviewers include three to four people from the engineering team, one from Human Resources and one senior level person e.g. director or head of the group type person to finish it off. The engineering team asks you to write significant code involving commonly used data structures, linked lists and trees etc. and also code that would require certain tricks of the trade that only veteran or seasoned programmers would know. So in my opinion, this is a timely arrival and gives lots of useful information to build the required confidence and thinking pattern to ace such interviews. The techniques described are all familiar and used frequently by most engineers and computer scientists in the field, but being able to answer promptly in an interview is a different ball game and I have suffered because of the lack of confidence in interviews. So, in my opinion, it deserves at least four stars.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Read this book before your next interview! Volt recommends it. February 16, 2007

By Ferdi Tern

Format:Paperback

I just had an interview appointment at Microsoft campus just this morning. I was applying a tech job as a software tester thru Volt Services. Volt (or any technology hiring services) would give some interview tips and prep for applicants vying for vacant positions.

The Microsoft interviewer asked me brain teasers like how many hamburgers have been consumed this year in the US alone. And he asked me how did I arrive with my conclusions by writing it on the whiteboard. (After the interview, he told me that he was not interested whether my answer was accurate or not, but he was more interested no how I arrived with my conclusion by writing it on a whiteboard).

After the brain teaser, he asked about network troubleshooting and remote file searching accross the network and that was easy. And then the interviewer began to ask about programming algorithms and how these algorithms be tested against predefined testing procedures. One of the questions given to me was similar in this book! The question was to create an algorithm of a string, "This is a string" to display on a screen written in a reversed order. And test the result of the algorithm against the methodical procedures applied to software testing.

Microsoft and other tech companies out there asked questions of many kind. And they may or may not be in any book available. But having and reading this book can increase your chances of a better interview results. I hope this review helps.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Delivers as Advertised December 29, 2004

By Mike

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Programming Interviews Exposed gives a good refresher on data structure problems (and similar programming interview questions) in C with a concise discussion on the choices and trade-offs made in reaching the solution.

Programming Interviews Exposed was true to the book's description. It emphasizes programming problems that are typically asked in interviews (and to a lesser extent touches on logic puzzles and knowledge-based questions). My friends/colleagues and I have actually been asked several of these exact questions. If you want a book emphasizing logic puzzles this is not the book for you.

Programming Interviews Exposed doesn't quite give you "Everything you need to know to succeed in the programming interview", but it emphatically does give a very solid, general base you must demonstrate in order to give the other portions of your interview credibility.

The book emphasizes solutions in C, giving a couple solutions in Perl, and Java. The C language is appropriate as C++ and Java have syntax very similar to C and in the programming interview questions you are typically prohibited from using built-in and/or standard library features that would make the questions trivial. The point of the questions, after all, are to see how well you understand and can puzzle out the details involved in implementing data structures and similar.