Elements of Programming Interviews

There are many run of the mill coding interview books available in the market and most of them are sufficient for getting a job at any decent software company. But if you want a job at any of the Big 4: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, you have to study this book. Specifically: 1. The problem analysis is top notch. This kind of thinking and analysis is exactly what's expected at the Big 4 interviews. 2. The coding standard in the solutions is "production grade". I have gone through many coding cram books and their solution code is simply not up to the mark. You may get a job if you code like that but you'll definitely be a desired candidate if you can get your coding chops up to the level of this books' authors. 3. The questions are not trivial. "Growth comes at the point of resistance" - If you have been solving simple Easy/Medium level problems, you'll quickly reach a point of stasis. If you want to perform at level X during your interviews, you have to train at level 2X. As someone once said, "We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training." This book will have you covered in that area. The "ninja level" questions are specifically meant for this kind of training. 4. The study plan is just awesome. Don't waste your time regurgitating CLRS etc. If you are truly focused on interview survival, just choose the appropriate study plan prescribed in this book and you should be through. All the best!

I have preparing for Programming Interviews for a quite some time now. I have found this book as the de facto book for preparing for the programming interviews. The problems are sorted in ascending order of difficulty which helps the student to prepare in increments. I have faced interviews in Amazon and UBER and found problems from this book in those F2F interviews. The collection is also rich with medium to hard problems with an theoretical introduction to each topic at the beginning of each chapter. Also there is a Honor Class at the end of the book which is a collection of all the Ninja problems that will give the candidate the confidence to face any interview.

This book is the absolute gold standard for interview preparation. The problems are quite challenging and hence you may need to devote an entire year on this book, considering you would solve one problem a day. But I say it's worth it. However I found the learning curve for this book very steep so you would probably want to quit a lot in the beginning. Just hold on and you'll love it! And yes get yourself a breather on data structures and algorithms if you don't want the book to be an absolute nightmare :)

Contains a lot of real life problems which one can think of (before reading through the solutions ;) ). Because that's how we all learn better (by trying to solve it through continuous learning by ourselves and then check how other solutions work (better or less better)

Amazing purchase, good print and the content of this book pure gold.

Book table of contents looks fine, yet to start reading it. But its a small book with tiny fonts.. not sure how much useful for anyone.

I would rate this as 'kerninghan and ritchie' of programming interviews. The material is in-depth and clearly written. WARN: Not for a casual read. You need to pay attention to what has been described and try to work out problems. Its kind of tricky (like JEE questions :). I also liked "cracking the coding interview" but I liked this one better. Great if you are a C/C++ programmer. (CTCI may be better suited for Java programmers).

The book arrived on time, but the front cover was bent inside the package. Could have done a better job with the packaging. Coming to the book itself, my advice to people buying this book would be: "Dont skip any questions". There are close to 300 questions in the book for all difficulty levels, and some developers might be wary of concepts like Bit Manipulation (which the book starts with). But please stick with these concepts, as they come handy during performance and optimization-based discussions in interviews. Another point is the concise summary of data structures and algorithms given in part 1 of the book. It is NOT a self-sufficient summary, and will require external references (GeeksForGeeks etc.) for better understanding. My advice is to have elemental knowledge of DS&Algo before approaching this book. TL;DR A great book for budding developers who want to take their knowledge to the next level. The solutions are in C++, but C# / Java developers should have little issues adapting the code.