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

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Key Phrases: nonrepeated character, slower pointer, delete elem, Linked Lists, Object-Oriented Programming, United States (more...)
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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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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
*

Ways to prepare for the entire programming interview process
*

How to find the kind of programming job that fits you best
*

Strategies for choosing a solution and what your approach says about you
*

How to improve your interviewing skills so that you can respond to any question or situation
*

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.
See all Editorial Reviews

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 (78 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,448 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

    #3 in  Books > Business & Investing > Job Hunting & Careers > Interviewing
    #5 in  Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > High-Tech
    #28 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools

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More About the Authors

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Noah Suojanen
Noah Suojanen
Eric Giguere
Eric Giguere
John Mongan
John Mongan

Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
nonrepeated character, slower pointer, delete elem, nontechnical questions, acyclic list, bool remove, current position pointer, tail pointer, heavy marble, complement notation, bit operators, preorder traversal, job application process
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Linked Lists, Object-Oriented Programming, United States, The Job Application Process, Knowledge-based Questions, Programming Problems, Other Programming Topics, Rajiv Williams, George Rogers, Event Thread
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Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, 2nd Edition (Programmer to Programmer)
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78 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
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133 of 139 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
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.
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37 of 42 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.
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14 of 15 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 (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job (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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely worth it!!
This is an amazing book if you are a student looking for internships and full time positions in core Computer Science. Read more
Published 12 hours ago by Hersh Sridhar Iyer

5.0 out of 5 stars well organized, clear explanation, useful interview tips
I love this book. It gives very useful instructions about how to answer interview questions.
The programming knowledge is explained clearly and well-organized. Read more
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5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for programming jobs
I have been interviewing recently and I must say this book reflects very much how the interviews are conducted. This is especially true in Silicon Valley. Read more
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2.0 out of 5 stars Sadly Lacking, and Not Reality
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5.0 out of 5 stars Interviews Exposed
The book gives you an idea of the types of questions that you will be asked in interviews. The amazing part is that since this book is based on real world interviews, and many of... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Joseph Colton

5.0 out of 5 stars Great collection of tips when brushing up your programming knowledge
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Published 3 months ago by Derek Lei

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference for software engineers
Good reference and starting point. It is only to give you an idea, so you must use other material to be prepared.
Published 4 months ago by Salomon C. Velazquez

5.0 out of 5 stars good condition
the book is in good condition and no tears and is in pretty new condition, no marks as well
Published 5 months ago by Samuel B. Kummary

5.0 out of 5 stars AMAZING
I almost wish I don't review this so I can keep it a secret. I had been looking for a book like this and after I found this one, I read it in about 3 days non-stop. Read more
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4.0 out of 5 stars Good Purchase
I just had a phone interview for an embedded job at a large company and the one algorithm problem I was asked came directly from this book. Read more
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