69 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not a silver bullet, January 21, 2009
This review is from: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, 2nd Edition (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)
The bulk (90%) of this book focuses on basic C.S. algorithms. A few pages at the end are dedicated to the "soft questions", or non-technical stuff.
Really, this book is a direct result of the "Interview 2.0" concept that came out in the late 90s and still persists. I feel that a lot of tech companies (except perhaps a select few, such as Google and MS) have realized that interviews based exclusively on basic C.S. algorithm knowledge isn't the way to pick the best candidate.
There is a *ton* of material in this book. If you focus on it, you may end up shooting yourself in the foot. So make sure your target company is going to be focused on algorithm questions before you put the time into doing the problems here. Or avoid those companies. Honestly, you're wasting your life relearning this stuff, as interesting as it is, unless you're going to be designing algorithmic libraries.
Also, don't forget the soft questions (your past experience is really important!).
Update, 2009-02-23:
Looking back at this review, I may have been a bit too harsh. This is an excellent book in a lot of ways. It is a great review of some of the more famous algorithm problems in computer science (although I'd recommend picking up Bentley's Programming Pearls if you want a real glance into famous algorithmic problems). It also has some general good advice on soft questions, although I wish it had spent more time on this area - as I learned the hard way in one of my first interviews looking for a new job. And hence why I rated this 3 stars at the time.
Regardless, I still flip through it every time before an interview... So if I could, I would revise my rating up to 4 stars.
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book for experienced professionals back in the job market, June 14, 2010
This review is from: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, 2nd Edition (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)
I have over 20 years of software development experience and have been at my current company for over 10 years. And that job was through a friend. So I hadn't interviewed or written a resume in quite some time. I found out pretty quickly that things had changed since my last job search.
Given today's competitive market, I find that more employers are looking not only at experience (as they did in my prior job searches), but also are testing applicants on college level computer science. It's true that professionals have taken these courses, but it's been a very long time since I had to write a binary tree algorithm. Once you have experience, you still need to understand data structures and algorithms, but I'd seriously worry about a programmer that wrote their own btree functions. Part of software engineering is understanding what you need, where to find the libraries and tools to support your selection, and understanding how to apply them. So I was taken by surprise when asked about btree algorithms and red/black tree traversal. I remembered these concepts, but wasn't prepared to sit down and code one.
This is where this book came in handy. It sets the stage for interviewing in today's marketplace, covers all those CS101 concepts that some of us are rusty at, and provided good examples to practice working through those low level concepts.
I found it very helpful for my second round of interviews at a very technical company.
For those people that say there is no silver bullet, or that you can't learn to be a computer scientist from one book, I totally agree. But that is not the intended audience. This book is great for those of us that have all that knowledge, but are a bit rusty on some of the data structure internals. It's also great for experienced professionals who have been out of the market for a while.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Programming interviews exposed" vs "Cracking the coding interview", May 12, 2011
This review is from: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, 2nd Edition (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)
"Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job"
(2nd edn), John Mongan, Noah Suojanen and Eric Giguère (2nd edn, 2007)
is a good book, but so is the very similar "Cracking the coding
interview" (4th ed, 2008) by Gayle Laakman. Which should you choose?
Here are the main differences:
- "Exposed" is much more readable: it explains the solutions in
English before giving code, whereas "Cracking" often just presents
code with minimal explanation. Another nice thing is that "Exposed"
presents the solution in stages, so you can read the first part of the
solution to get a hint, and then try again. By contrast, "Cracking"
just gives the key idea right away, so even a "peek" at the solutions
means it's game over (modulo coding issues, which are usually easy).
- "Cracking" has more questions, and they generally seem to be a bit
harder. They are sorted in order of increasing difficulty, which is
helpful.
- "Cracking" gives solutions in Java, although the code seems to have
some errors (see other reviews on amazon). "Exposed" gives solutions
in a mix of languages (C++, Java, C#), although they only use one
language per question.
- "Cracking" contains some grammatical errors (for example, Gayle
often mixes up "eg" and "ie"). In addition, many explanations would be much clearer with
an example.
- Both books are similar in length (about 300 pages), and their "non
technical" advice is very similar.
- Overall, "Exposed" is easier to read, but "Cracking" has more
content. Tough call.
There is also the good book "Algorithms For Interviews" by Adnan Aziz
and Amit Prakash (2010), which contains much harder questions,
focusing on clever algorithms and not on implementation details. Do
not attempt this book before mastering "Cracking" and/or "Exposed",
you will find it demoralizing! But it's probably worth trying some of
these harder problems, to see how "fancier" algorithms (like Dijkstra,
or max-flow min-cut, or dynamic programming) can be applied in
creative ways.
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