Take a photo of a barcode or cover
bucketoffish 's review for:
Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
This book is known as the Bible for coding job seekers, and for good reason. It contains a huge amount of good information on everything from how to contact recruiters and prepare for interviews, to how to accept offers, to (the bulk of the book) many problems on basic coding concepts.
The concepts in this book are presented in a very straightforward way, quickly and with no bullshit. For every one page of explanation there are ten problems for you to figure out for yourself, with hints and detailed solutions in the back of the book. As someone with no formal computer science background, I found this book to be a quick read and very instructive. After reading it, I started implementing many of the things I learned into my own code. The problems chosen are also very interesting, and some of them have pretty cool solutions. All the problems in the book are illuminating and tricky in some way, but also simple and basic enough that you can solve them in your head without the use of paper or a computer. This makes it possible to solve problems while commuting to work, so it's very convenient to fit this book into your current routine. (Of course, you should implement some solutions from each chapter on a computer as well, to make sure you can carry over theory to practice!)
Overall, I would say this book is a very useful and easy read, especially if you have no computer science background. The problems are interesting but not difficult, and they will teach you new ways to approach your own code, so it's good preparation to run through before starting job interviews.
The concepts in this book are presented in a very straightforward way, quickly and with no bullshit. For every one page of explanation there are ten problems for you to figure out for yourself, with hints and detailed solutions in the back of the book. As someone with no formal computer science background, I found this book to be a quick read and very instructive. After reading it, I started implementing many of the things I learned into my own code. The problems chosen are also very interesting, and some of them have pretty cool solutions. All the problems in the book are illuminating and tricky in some way, but also simple and basic enough that you can solve them in your head without the use of paper or a computer. This makes it possible to solve problems while commuting to work, so it's very convenient to fit this book into your current routine. (Of course, you should implement some solutions from each chapter on a computer as well, to make sure you can carry over theory to practice!)
Overall, I would say this book is a very useful and easy read, especially if you have no computer science background. The problems are interesting but not difficult, and they will teach you new ways to approach your own code, so it's good preparation to run through before starting job interviews.