Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, 2nd Edition (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

by John Mongan (Author), Noah Suojanen (Author), Eric Gigučre (Author)
Key Phrases: nonrepeated character, slower pointer, delete elem, Linked Lists, Object-Oriented Programming, United States (more...)

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description
Programming Interviews Exposed
2nd Edition

The pressure is on during the interview process but with the right preparation, you can walk away with your dream job. This classic book uncovers what interviews are really like at America's top software and computer companies and provides you with the tools to succeed in any situation. The authors take you step-by-step through new problems and complex brainteasers they were asked during recent technical interviews.

50 interview scenarios are presented along with in-depth analysis of the possible solutions. The problem-solving process is clearly illustrated so you'll be able to easily apply what you've learned during crunch time. You'll also find expert tips on what questions to ask, how to approach a problem, and how to recover if you become stuck. All of this will help you ace the interview and get the job you want.

What you will learn from this book

* Tips for effectively completing the job application
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Ways to prepare for the entire programming interview process
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How to find the kind of programming job that fits you best
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Strategies for choosing a solution and what your approach says about you
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How to improve your interviewing skills so that you can respond to any question or situation
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Techniques for solving knowledge-based problems, logic puzzles, and programming problems

Who this book is for

This book is for programmers and developers applying for jobs in the software industry or in IT departments of major corporations.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 2 edition (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 047012167X
• ISBN-13: 978-0470121672
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #29,801 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

115 of 120 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 "johnkaplantech" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job (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.

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

This review is from: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job (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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spot on, December 6, 2007

By	C. Arnold (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read this book because I will soon be doing technical phone screens for my company, and I only wish I had read this book when I was looking for my last job!

While these types of problems may seem simplistic and largely irrelevant to many developer job applicants (myself included), the fact of the matter is many companies ask these types of questions at some point in the hiring process.

This book is great for giving job candidates an idea of what they might expect in the technical hiring process, as well as providing a great review of topics many of which some of us haven't dealt with since college (I don't think I"m alone in not having traversed a tree in the past 8 years).

Highly recommended.