Buy new:
$51.06$51.06
FREE delivery:
Friday, Feb 17
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Probetis Books
Buy Used: $14.87
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
97% positive over last 12 months
+ $5.12 shipping
100% positive over last 12 months

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job 3rd Edition
There is a newer edition of this item:
Enhance your purchase
In today's tight job market, competition for programming jobs is hotter than ever. This third edition of a popular guide to programming interviews includes new code examples, information on the latest languages, new chapters on sorting and design patterns, tips on using LinkedIn, and a downloadable app to help prepare applicants for the interview. Like its earlier editions, this guide covers what software companies and IT departments want their programmers to know and includes plenty of helpful hints to boost your confidence.
- Looks at current job search and hiring processes, such as the rise of LinkedIn and other social networks as recruiting resources
- Addresses the most important languages for a programmer to know and features examples in multiple languages
- Includes new programming questions designed to sharpen your knowledge
- Features all-new chapters on design patterns and sorting, including how to deal with memory constraints and mobility issues
Walk into your next job interview with confidence, knowing you have thoroughly studied this newest edition of Programming Interviews Exposed.
- ISBN-101118261364
- ISBN-13978-1118261361
- Edition3rd
- PublisherWrox
- Publication dateNovember 13, 2012
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7.3 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
- Print length336 pages
![]() |
Frequently bought together
- +
- +
What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Get the job you want by gaining the interview skills you need
Landing a great programming job isn't a matter of luck; it's a matter of being prepared for the unique challenges of the technical job search. Programming interviews require a different set of skills than day-to-day programming, so even expert programmers often struggle if they don't know what to expect. This thoroughly revised and expanded third edition teaches you the skills you need to apply your programming expertise to the types of problems most frequently encountered in interviews at top tech companies today. Step-by-step solutions to an extensive set of sample interview questions simulate the interview experience to hone the skills you've learned. After you've worked through this book, you'll approach your interviews with confidence, knowing you can solve any problem that stands between you and the job you really want.
Programming Interviews Exposed:
- Leads you through the job search process, including the most effective techniques for employing LinkedIn and other social networks
- Teaches you the techniques you need to solve any interview problem
- Illustrates the full thought process of application of these techniques to real interview problems with step-by-step solutions
- Solves each problem with code in C, C++, C# or Java, with emphasis on object-oriented solutions
- Includes new chapters on sorting and design patterns and new questions on 64-bit computing and secure programming practices
wrox.com
Programmer Forums
Join our Programmer to Programmer forums to ask and answer programming questions about this book, join discussions on the hottest topics in the industry, and connect with fellow programmers from around the world.
Read More
Find articles, ebooks, sample chapters, and tables of contents for hundreds of books, and more reference resources on programming topics that matter to you.
Get the Companion App
Visit piexposed.com/app and download the companion app, which offers helpful tips and reminders for success in your programming interviews.
About the Author
John Mongan is a resident radiologist at UC San Francisco, conducting research in medical informatics. He has a PhD in bioinformatics and several patents on software testing technologies.
Eric Giguere is a software engineer at Google with over 20 years of professional programming experience. He has a master's degree in computer science and is the author of several programming books.
Noah Kindler is VP Technology at the security technology company Avira. He leads software design and development teams across several products with a user base of over 100 million.
Wrox Professional guides are written by working developers to address everyday needs. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.
Product details
- Publisher : Wrox; 3rd edition (November 13, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1118261364
- ISBN-13 : 978-1118261361
- Item Weight : 1.27 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.3 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #159,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #59 in Job Interviewing (Books)
- #174 in Job Hunting (Books)
- #255 in Software Development (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Eric Giguere is the author of several books and numerous magazine and online articles on computers and programming. His most recent book is Programming Interviews Exposed, now in its third edition. He's also an expert at wireless and mobile programming, and has tons of Java experience.
Eric has master's and bachelor's degrees in computer science from the University of Waterloo. He still lives in Waterloo, Ontario, where he works for Google as a Senior Software Engineer.
I learned programming at Stanford and have worked at start-ups and big companies. I currently publish a blog where I ask one question a day to allow programmers to keep their skills up to date - and to to prepare for programming interviews at: http://www.codewod.com/
Here's a talk I recently gave on approaching programming interviews: http://blog.hackbrightacademy.com/2013/11/video-programming-interviews-exposed-author-noah-kindler/
Please send along any questions.
Thank you,
Noah
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
To begin, ALL FOUR of the books in this review are 5 star "superstars" for IT interviews. The two problems are, my library customers want to know the top two, and our Amazon shoppers want to know if they can get away with one, two, three, or if they have to buy all four! Of course the answer depends both on the focus of your resume, and the overlap/focus in the four books.
First, the summary, by author, title/Amazon link, year published/edition, number of pages, trim and cost, problems included, main language(s) foci. These four are the most frequently purchased by the over 100,000 libraries (including corporate technical libraries and schools as well as private and public) in our database. (Note: page counts are via visual inspection at the time of this writing, not Amazon stats. Pages can vary with on-demand books.).
Aziz, Elements of Programming Interviews: 300 Questions and Solutions by Aziz, Adnan, Prakash, Amit, Lee, Tsung-Hsien 1st (first) Edition (10/11/2012) , 2012, 481 pages, 6 x 9, $25, 300 problems (mostly C++, concurrency in Java, discrete math in formulas and English)
McDowell, Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions , 2011 (5th edition), 500 pages, 6 x 9, $23, 150 problems, (mostly all Java except of course the C, C++ question sections!)
Guiness, Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success , 2013, 419 pages, 6 x 9, $20, 160 problems, (mostly Java and C# but some unusual JavaScript, SQL, Ruby and Perl examples too)
Mongan, Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job , 2013 (ed. 3), 301 pages, 7.4 x 9, $18, 150+ problems (C, C++, C#, Java)
All four of these fine prep texts cover the usual suspects in Algorithms and Data structures, including a focus on "scalable" problems of most concern to the Amazons, Googles, Facebooks, etc. of the world. These include recursion, arrays, lists, hash tables, binary searches and trees, and other foundation coding subjects.
All also cover the usual tricks, brain teasers, presentation problems, prep, process, etc. issues, and in the case of Cracking, specifics on many different company processes.
The divergence is in the "extras." Aziz jumps into parallel computing and covers discrete math (in grad school joke terms, all the computer oriented math that has been taken out of high school courses). McDowell has an unusually well written probability section. Guiness is very up to date with cross platform apps and concurrent programming nightmares, and goes into both more depth and detail on individual topics like big O notation. Mongan is published by wrox, and has not only technical editors, but outstanding web resources. His database section is the most robust of the group.
Aziz and McDowell are print on demand, which usually means there are many more errors in early going, but much faster correction of them via almost weekly files to the printer. Guiness is Wiley and bulletproof. We've tested the code extensively in all four (my payroy sister programmers, not me!) and ALL of them are outstanding, with very few errors at this writing, which can only get better fast in the two PODs, and wasn't a problem to begin with via the technically edited wrox and wiley teams.
Surprisingly, there is NOT a lot of overlap in solutions in these four texts, just as there IS a lot of overlap in the questions (strings, arrays, binaries, hashes... structures are structures and algos are algos). The difference in ALL these books (as opposed to a Cormen) is that the algorithm examples are not academic--they give you many options to "cheat" - and most of the cheats are more real world than techniques given in the 1,300 page algo function texts.
McDowell is the industry standard, but she teaches very much to Google, as does Aziz, meaning web focus, and even a little forgiveness on php, but NO forgiveness on memory or scalability. If you're a library client and have to pick two, we advise one from the McDowell/ Aziz dyad and one from the Guiness/ Mongan dyad. If you're applying for a job with a specific language requirement, these self sort, although of course all are object oriented today.
For shoppers preparing for a real interview: buy all four. I mean, come on. This is your future! You can get all four for the price you'd pay for a larger (way less useful) algo + data structure or individual language text, and maybe less. Some points about interview technique are common, but all four offer different and important examples in approaches to solutions, even though they share common algorithmic and data structure challenges.
IRONY: The only programming area growing faster than data scientist today is at the other end of the big scale spectrum: embedded systems. I kid you not, specialize in embedded, and you're GUARANTEED a dream job, both due to the explosion of these systems, and the rarity of programmers here (but yes, you have to get into circuits!). Our sister Payroy group shows job stats, demand and salaries that are to die for if you go there-- way better than Google. NONE of these books cover it (because other than mobile and server embeds, embedded was traditionally automotive and industrial, but even "Google and Microsoft TV" type ventures are now hungering for it).
There is NO good interview book out on embedded yet, but these two are the best of breed in the field itself: 1. Samek ( Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems ) and 2. White ( Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software ). Why C and C++? Because that's where the majority of electronics still reside, and "object" programmers in the field often just use the C subset of ++ and don't really get into sexy classes/methods/parents/kids, etc.! 6 months brushing up on this, specializing, and going for an embedded job will be worth years of competing with the interviews in these texts!!!
Now, a simple tip. I was part of a team that interviewed for a high level, very high paying digital art programming position at shader joes dot com. One candidate stood out as really technically challenged--she even confused a call with a register in one of her answers! She called herself an "autodidact" - meaning, unlike Yahoo, we can't be recruiting only from the 18 top schools.
At the end of her interview, she asked us to check out a disc she'd brought. She had programmed her own video game with movie-real characters, explosions, storyline, etc. using Unity, Maya, blastcode, Python, Lua and C#, with web distributions in Java, HTML 5 and php. She proceeded to explain her entire process, from idea to distribution. She was hired before she could reach the elevator. In olden-days, old timer parlance, don't forget your "portfolio" if you have one! It can trump a LOT of the bureaucratic hurdles!
EMAILERS ANSWER: IF you are a manager, rusty at coding, a data scientist, etc. and are in an interview where you have to "understand" coding basics, but not necessarily code, see our review of Karumanchi ( Coding Interview Questions ).
Library Picks reviews only for the benefit of Amazon shoppers and has nothing to do with Amazon, the authors, manufacturers or publishers of the items we review. We always buy the items we review for the sake of objectivity, and although we search for gems, are not shy about trashing an item if it's a waste of time or money for Amazon shoppers. If the reviewer identifies herself, her job or her field, it is only as a point of reference to help you gauge the background and any biases.
I found the chapters on Linked Lists (ch 4), Graphs (ch 5), Strings (ch 6) and Recursion (ch 7) to be the most useful.
The explanations provided in the book was good, but I wouldn’t use it as a pure substitute for learning data structures. I prefer textbooks for that.
The exercises however, are the meat of this book. Each of the questions presented are very practical and are pretty close to what you would be asked in an interview. I’d say if you want to really prepare for your typical programming interview, definitely pick this books up.
It’s also pretty useful for a quick read for a review of data structures and basic algorithmic concepts if you find that you were very comfortable with theoretical CS in the past and and just want to brush up in a practical sense.
Highly recommended buy. I have already read this book 3 or 4 times already in the past 6 years or so. :)
What is this book good at?
Teaching you the fundamentals like you know nothing. This book is like a super condensed version of any algorithms and data structures textbook that reminds you of everything you've learnt (perhaps forgotten) in school.
What is it not?
Although this book does have some interesting problems to solve, the focus is to get your basics in place rather than have you practise a bunch of problems(which is more the approach of Cracking the Coding Interview). It does not necessarily teach you how to be a good interviewee but rather teaches you how to be a good programmer.
This book is great for a person who's lost touch with the basics or just needs a refresher of sorts. It is also good for students to help them understand what parts of their textbooks are most important in terms of interviews. Although, if you are a student, I suggest you pair this book with Craking the Coding interview for your interview prep since that book trains you more practically while this book gives you a strong sense theoretically.
Top reviews from other countries

If you're a recent graduate (or someone just about to graduate) looking for work, or if you simply have trouble with the programming tests commonly used in today's programming interviews, then this book is well worth your time.



