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Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions 6th Edition
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I am not a recruiter. I am a software engineer. And as such, I know what it's like to be asked to whip up brilliant algorithms on the spot and then write flawless code on a whiteboard. I've been through this as a candidate and as an interviewer.
Cracking the Coding Interview, 6th Edition is here to help you through this process, teaching you what you need to know and enabling you to perform at your very best. I've coached and interviewed hundreds of software engineers. The result is this book.
Learn how to uncover the hints and hidden details in a question, discover how to break down a problem into manageable chunks, develop techniques to unstick yourself when stuck, learn (or re-learn) core computer science concepts, and practice on 189 interview questions and solutions.
These interview questions are real; they are not pulled out of computer science textbooks. They reflect what's truly being asked at the top companies, so that you can be as prepared as possible.WHAT'S INSIDE?
- 189 programming interview questions, ranging from the basics to the trickiest algorithm problems.
- A walk-through of how to derive each solution, so that you can learn how to get there yourself.
- Hints on how to solve each of the 189 questions, just like what you would get in a real interview.
- Five proven strategies to tackle algorithm questions, so that you can solve questions you haven't seen.
- Extensive coverage of essential topics, such as big O time, data structures, and core algorithms.
- A behind the scenes look at how top companies like Google and Facebook hire developers.
- Techniques to prepare for and ace the soft side of the interview: behavioral questions.
- For interviewers and companies: details on what makes a good interview question and hiring process.
Illustrations noteIllustrations: Illustrations, black and white
- ISBN-100984782869
- ISBN-13978-0984782857
- Edition6th
- Publication dateJuly 1, 2015
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7 x 1.59 x 10 inches
- Print length687 pages
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Her background is in software development. She has worked as a software engineer at Google, Microsoft, and Apple. At Google, she interviewed hundreds of software engineers and evaluated thousands of hiring packets on the hiring committee. She holds a B.S.E. and M.S.E. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Wharton School.
She now consults with tech companies to improve their hiring process and with startups to prepare them for acquisition interviews.
Product details
- ASIN : 0984782850
- Publisher : CareerCup
- Publication date : July 1, 2015
- Edition : 6th
- Language : English
- Print length : 687 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0984782869
- ISBN-13 : 978-0984782857
- Item Weight : 2.75 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 1.59 x 10 inches
- Part of series : Cracking the Interview & Career
- Best Sellers Rank: #18,333 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Product Videos
About the author
Gayle Laakmann McDowell is an author, consultant, and founder focusing on improving tech hiring for both the interviewer and the candidate.
Gayle has worked as an engineer for Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Most recently, at Google, she served on the hiring committee where she interviewed hundreds of candidates and evaluated thousands more. It was here that she discovered the disconnect between candidates, their skill set, and their interview performance.
Though her company, CareerCup, Gayle has worked with many of the top tech companies to reform their hiring practices and implement interviewer training programs.
She is the author and creator the best-selling Cracking the Interview & Career series: Cracking the Coding Interview, Cracking the PM Interview (co-authored with Jackie Bavaro), Cracking the PM Career (co-authored with Jackie Bavaro), and Cracking the Tech Career
Gayle holds a bachelor's and master's in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
She currently consults, writes, and codes from her home in Palo Alto, California. She can be found online at gayle.com, twitter (@gayle), and facebook (@gayle).
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book an excellent guide to interview preparation, with detailed explanations of advanced topics and useful information on algorithms. Moreover, they appreciate how it helps refresh skills and serves as a great jump start into algorithms, with surprising questions and solutions. However, the book receives mixed feedback regarding its ease of understanding, with some finding it easy to follow while others find it difficult to follow. Additionally, the complexity aspect is also mixed, with some praising the problems while others describe them as a mishmash.
Customers find this book to be an excellent guide to interview preparation, containing valuable insights into the interview process and being incredibly useful for practicing coding questions.
"This agreat book for interview preparation"Read more
"Great interview prep! Covers exactly what you need to know."Read more
"Perfect book for interview."Read more
"This book isideal for coding interviews / online judge sessions. Quickly helped recap Computation Thinking knowledge with clear examples."Read more
Customers appreciate the book's detailed explanations, particularly for advanced topics, and find it comprehensive with useful information on algorithms. The book provides hints for every question and helps readers understand the purpose of using data structures.
"...Very practical andto the point, and very usable and readable for young adults and college students...."Read more
"Very detailed and encyclopedic coverage of programming tasks. It would take months to work through them all...."Read more
"Good book that has awealth of knowledge to keep you up to speed"Read more
"...Very good introduction to the process of software engineering interview process."Read more
Customers find the book very helpful and useful for refreshing skills, particularly noting it serves as a great resource for relearning concepts from school.
"Really helpful references and guides.Very useful, even after you land your first role"Read more
"Indepth anduseful for someone who is trying to learn the ways of interviewing. The book is almost as new- no complaints!"Read more
"...Overall, I think this avery helpful book. I would recommend you begin reading this book immediately after your first course on Algorithms...."Read more
"The content of this book are beyond great, great explanation andexercises...."Read more
Customers find the book well worth their money.
"This is great for preparing for technical interviews! Must have.Worth every penny."Read more
"...It's really huge and has a lot of exercises. It agood investment."Read more
"great for the price! worked well...."Read more
"Thequality and price is good."Read more
Customers appreciate the book's programming knowledge, particularly its advanced concepts and algorithms, with one customer noting it serves as an excellent resource for revising skills.
"...Gayle did an amazing job on teaching about various concepts,algorithms, system design, and more!..."Read more
"...It's got a lot of great people advise as well asprogramming advice."Read more
"Excellent book with coding examples and algorithms. I am reading this as a reference to prepare for programming interviews and jobs."Read more
"Great programming problems with explanations that accompany the solutions...."Read more
Customers find the cognitive value of the book positive, with surprising questions and solutions that help relearn crucial topics and improve analytical and coding skills. One customer notes that it gets their brain into study mode, while another mentions it changes their thought process.
"Good collection of questions. Many solutions are debatable though."Read more
"This book is well-written andthoughtful. It has a good focus for successful interviewing...."Read more
"Great book. A lot ofinsightful tips! Thank you Gayle!"Read more
"...itmakes you think outside the box and come up with new ways to tackle problems in an efficient manner...."Read more
Customers have mixed experiences with the book's clarity, with some finding it easy to follow and well-explained, while others report it being difficult to understand.
"...CS fundamentals this books offers a refresher course andeasy to follow examples."Read more
"This book isvery hard to follow. The author does a terrible job explaining the technical topics and does not provide useful insights."Read more
"Excellent book! Itexplains difficult things in easy way, everything is very structured."Read more
"...Explanations are concise and excellent with viewpoints that makes everything simple."Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the complexity of the book's problems, with some finding them good while others describe them as a mishmash.
"Good examples, explanations, andproblems. Title is off-putting, but rip off the cover and it's got some smart tips and strategies...."Read more
"...a person needs in order to nail the interview, and thebook had many typos."Read more
"This bookcontains the set of problems you are very like to be asked in an interview...."Read more
"...* Solutions,breadth of problems still lacking. For example, there's a question in the recursion/dynamic programming section on counting steps...."Read more
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2016Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseWhile 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 - Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2015Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseSince the first edition, I've recommended Cracking the Coding Interview to people preparing for technical interviews. Gayle has a depth and breadth of knowledge that she shares freely in this book. She means what she says too: she's not a recruiter, or a sourcer, or affiliated with any of those groups -- she's an engineer who knows what it takes to be prepared for and ace a technical job interview.
Full disclaimer: I worked with Gayle at Google, and I know her -- and back in the day I even saw her code. Forearmed with this additional information on how she works, I can say that she really knows her stuff here.
There's a reason why multiple companies recommend this book to prospective candidates to prepare. It's not a cookbook, you can't just learn the examples rote and then ace an interview. For one thing: hiring managers like me know about the book, and we're not going to let our teams ask exactly these questions. However, by working through the examples in the book, you will gain an understanding and refresh your software engineering knowledge to a level where any algorithm, design or coding question that is thrown at you will be answerable.
By following and solving the examples in this book, you'll refresh your memory on how to approach these problems. You'll make mistakes, and be more comfortable with making those mistakes and then moving past them. You'll get some insight into how you approach problems and potential pitfalls in your methodology. There are incredibly useful tips on how to describe your solutions, how to work through a coding question, and how to answer some more thorny behavioral questions.
The 6th edition, with its additional 50+ questions, expanded solutions and explanations of the tech hiring process will put you in a good position to do your best in your job interview. As a hiring manager, I want you to do your best. The better you are prepared, the less nervous you'll be when you interview, and the better you'll perform. This book is an indispensable part of your interview preparation. - Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2017Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseBest book I ever bought. I'm fairly certain the interview preparation guide and sample coding questions gave me the edge I needed to get through a recent, grueling coding interview emerging to be described by my recruiter and the clients as the "best candidate they'd seen in weeks".
I was inspired to buy the book and learn from it after having made it all the way to the final phase of a long multi-test interview process with another company. What I lacked was the ability to resist the urge to panic and the confidence to do what I needed to succeed in a time-pressured whiteboard question. Although my portfolio was great and my personality evaluations very positive, with my terrible whiteboard performance I left those fine people with the impression I didn't know my head from my you know what.
I found that the book's instructions were very helpful in providing a blueprint in how to slow down and think methodically and as a result I'm not just better at interviews, but a better coder overall I believe. By no means am I finished absorbing all the wisdom from this book, but I've already reaped immeasurable reward from just one short dedicated week studying it.
Finally, while certainly this book cannot take you from 0 to 60 or replace a lack of portfolio, it will help polish experienced coders, especially the self-taught, maybe who need a little help communicating their ideas or tackling the kind of problems that are current interview fodder, which as we all know can be quite alien from the comfort zones of our specialties. Although, pure beginners may also get some value out of this as a learning checklist for being able to do the minimum of what the industry now expects developers to know well.
Just buy the book!
Top reviews from other countries
- Madson MarceloReviewed in Brazil on October 2, 2025
5.0 out of 5 starsLivro muito bom, mas fui taxado
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseLivro excelente. - UQI8Reviewed in Turkey on May 26, 2025
5.0 out of 5 starsiyi paketleme güzel ürün
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchaseiyi paketleme güzel ürün - VictorReviewed in Mexico on May 19, 2024
5.0 out of 5 starsAmazing book and the code is very readable
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThe perfect choice to land your next programming job, all the text, diagrams and code printed are readable and very easy to follow. - Cristina Gonzalez MarreroReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 5, 2025
5.0 out of 5 starsVery useful book!
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseEveryone in computer science should have this book, loooove this! - JustinReviewed in Canada on October 3, 2016
5.0 out of 5 starsChanged the way I looked at a lot of problems
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis is a really good book. It has a lot of really good problems, amazing career advice, and just a lot of worthwhile content for the price. My favourite thing about this book is how it explains how you should get in the habit of being able to do the same problem different ways or look at it at a different angle. Sure, you might be able to write a one line hack that solves a problem quickly and very efficiently, but what if you had to solve it another way, using a much more unconventional approach?
Personally I'm working towards being a sysadmin/database admin and programming isn't the main focus of my education but the more I use it the more I can see it being a required skill for employment as I approach my now graduating year. Also this book has motivated me to learn Java much better.
Anyway aside from all the great programming advice, it also offers some really nice insights into the hiring process of very high end tech companies and also things you should do to improve your chance of being hired.. and I can tell you it doesn't always come down to how well you can solve complex problems.
