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68 of 71 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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20 of 20 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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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All Microsoft Interview Questions, April 14, 2008
This review is from: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, 2nd Edition (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)
Buy this book if you are interviewing with MSFT anytime soon. I have two brothers and both work for MSFT. They both think this book is a very good prep. Moreover, my eldest bro is an interviewer at MSFT and he uses this book! So does the other 4 interviewers he knows at MSFT.
1) This book has sample interview questions for you to solve and several approaches for each question.
2) The book then tells you which approach is the best and why. VERY VERY NICE!
3) This book also tells you how to approach problems, how to make sure you are not stuck, how to brainstorm and get the best answer.
4) There are puzzle/riddle type questions too.
5) How to write resumes and cover letters as well.
6)Finally, the book also has very nice simple tutorials of all the important/basic concepts of OOP.
Very comprehensive book. A MUST buy!
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