Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions (Cracking the Interview & Career)

While this book is meant for interview practice, I would recommend you still read it just for fun if you're into algorithms.I've always believed that there's no "crack" to coding interviews; it's just a matter of whether you can code or not (well, at least at those sane companies not filling up school buses with golf balls). And that requires practice. Lots of practice. Which is why I spent all my free time working out problems on Hackerrank. For me, this went well . . . for a while.But there comes a point at which you get stuck. I remember working on some hackerrank problems in the medium to hard difficulty which I would not be able to proceed for weeks and weeks. No amount of googling for information, discussion boards or stack overflow threads paint a complete picture to help you when you're stuck.After countless such occasions and failing a few interviews, I gave in and bought this book. After all it was $20 - the cost of an uber to work.Now, I wish I had bought this sooner!Within reading the first two chapters I've already learnt so much about how to think about coding problems. There's also a nice collections of custom data structures at the end of the book. I've swiped some data structures straight out of this book and use them in my day-to-day life too.Gayle has done a tremendous job of using words to explain how that weird gooey gel inside your head moves like when problem-solving. She deconstructs every approach to tackle a problem into atomic pieces. She goes into great depth about alternative designs, tradeoffs and runtime complexity. She talks about visualizing recursive calls as trees, thinking about BUD*, amortized analysis of ArrayList and much more. The great thing is that Gayle goes into copious amounts of details for each solution - she talks about how to start from a brute force solutions and optimize each component one-by-one and talks about tradeoffs in approaches.Overall, I think this a very helpful book. I would recommend you begin reading this book immediately after your first course on Algorithms. It will certainly help drill down the concepts and help strengthen your fundamentals.*BUD is a special term the author uses to describe strategies to optimize solutions

I was never a smart student in the classroom. However, I was lucky to get selected to the best Engineering college in the country, where only top 300 maths stream students from the whole country yearly get selected to the national University Program. I passed out in 2006, but was not selected to the CSE program, because only the smarted 50 was chosen. Since then I never thought I will ever learn programming, or I could never work in the lucrative Software Field. However later after the Uni, I developed an interest in learning Programming for my Living, and since then I kept learning ever since, failing at some places, never giving up, growing up with some confidence...But was a tough Journey. Trying many courses, working every day after hours, for 11 years continuously working hard generally more than 12 hours at average on this field, and Have read, and followed a lot of books, nothing truly makes me confident. I realized, somewhere I have missed some fundamentals, some patterns of thinking, which kept me scared and unconfident, keeping a doubt about my fundamental expertise, in a far unrecognize place of my heart.Recently I got an interview call to work as a Google Contractor, which really impressed me. Again I found out, getting my self-prepared for such a challenge, I am not yet ready. I was feeling, I am missing some way of thinking. I got an Amazon interview. One of my friends recommend me this book, But by that I have already read, enough about the feedback for the book. I have my second interview for Amazon today, in other few hours. I am still not confident about Programming because I could not stay enough with the Book. However, I already have the feeling that this book is the most enlightening book, if you are like me, not very confident, not very super smart and still are planning to crack a coding interview with some smart answers. The book has extraordinarily smart real-world example solutions to some well-known/well-unknown interview questions, without which an average ordinary hardworking brain like of mine (not a college superstar nerd), could not imagine alone. Thank you, Gayle Laakmann McDowell. She is a Genious.