6 ms·

Code Interview Reading List

166 points by bcjordan 14y ago

bcjordan 14y ago
I'm curious to hear others' suggestions, especially for the programming language books I haven't personally read. Just to note, those are Amazon affiliate links. Proceeds from Coding for Interviews all funnel back into the list's MailChimp fees (I just made it last month, and the list has grown a lot since then).
- kubrickslair 14y ago
  There is a book called 'Algorithms for Interviews' by Aziz & Prakash. It is much more CS centric than CareerCup & does not provide explicit solutions to all problems- which is good. It also has more difficult questions, on average, and many are not the kind that one would expect in an under hour interview. Nevertheless I find it more easy to read than something like say CareerCup, mainly because it is not so mundane and hence more fun.
  - mikevm 14y ago
    They've released an update book which supersedes 'Algorithms for Interviews': http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews-Adnan-Aziz/dp/1479274836 http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews-Adnan-...
    - bcjordan 14y ago
      Will look into this, thanks for the pointer. Have you read it yet?
- cgh 14y ago
  Here are some that I really liked, which aren't "here's how to program" type books. I'm not going to repeat books that were mentioned in the OP, except to say...The Algorithm Design Manual. 1. Python Essential Reference - Beazley 2. Modern C++ Design - Alexandrescu (mind-blowing; he now works on the D language) 3. Internet Core Protocols: The Definitive Guide - Hall (not a work of any particular genius, but this is stuff everyone should know, in my opinion) 4. Applied Cryptography - Schneier 5. Think Bayes - Downey 6. Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches and Internetworking Protocols - Perlman
  - naner 14y ago
    Schneier's Cryptography Engineering (previous ed. was called Practical Cryptography) would be a far more useful crypto book than Applied Cryptography. I believe Schneier himself even recommends skipping his seminal book.
  - bcjordan 14y ago
    Thanks for the suggestions, just ordered a copy of Internet Core Protocols. Are you familiar with either Expert Python Programming or Effective C++? Would you suggest Python Essential Reference and/or Modern C++ Design over either of those for undergrads preparing for interviews in those languages?
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  i was impressed by peopleware, maybe because it agreed with my prejudices. i doubt it's going to help you with interviews as it's more about culture, but it's a fairly slim book that's worth the read (more than mythical man month, imho).
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  Your page is difficult to read at lunch on my iOS device because you have those floating social doodads on one side. They obscure your content and I don't want to fight it. This may affect your response rates. Just saying.
  - bcjordan 14y ago
    Wow, that is terrible, sorry for the eyesore. If you're still interested, try it now. It should hide for mobile browsers.
bjhoops1 14y ago
One of those mentioned in this article that I thought was particularly great was GUI Bloopers. I read this in college and when I went to work in the industry I was almost immediately tagged as a developer with a "good eye for design" (we had no actual designers) despite having had literally no other GUI experience. This is a fantastic read that should be required reading for everyone in The Enterprise. (Of course, with this newfound awareness comes massive frustration working on Enterprise applications which routinely serve as anti-patterns of UI design)
diego_moita 14y ago
The problem with any book list like this is the scope. Software is turning into a very diverse culture, a very heterogeneous ecosystem. Subjects that are very important to one area might not be as important to other areas. Design patterns are essential for enterprise development, not so much for AI and low level systems programming. Algorithms are essential for the latest but not for the former. Given this, there are some books you might add or remove depending on the area you are interested (e.g.: Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming", Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture", ...) To finish, 2 books people recommend a lot for beginning programmers: "The Pragmatic Programmer"- Hunt, Thomas: a very good book, with sound advice and very easy to read. The only bad side is that it became so influential that its ideas became vulgarized in thousands of blogs. "Code Complete" - Steve McConnel : A very dangerous book. It does give have a lot of sound advice. But, IMO, it has some big problems. First is that it gives the false impression that there is a lot of empirical evidence on what works on software engineering. Second, it perpetuates some myths that don't have such evidence: the "orders of magnitude programmer's productivity" and "the cone of uncertainty" (see: https://leanpub.com/leprechauns https://leanpub.com/leprechauns).
- tellarin 14y ago
  I overall agree with you on "Code Complete", but where did you find data that disproves 'orders of magnitude programmer's productivity'? I can't reach the linked website. I'd be genuinely interested to check that. While still anecdotal, my experience from working in big and small companies in 4 countries is that there certainly is a absurdly wide gap in productivity between programmers.
  - tjpick 14y ago
    Original source FOR the "orders of magnitude" claim seem to usually point back to Fred Brooks Mythical Man Month (5-10x) or Robert Glass (Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering) 28x. I don't think either of these multipliers are accurately expressed as "orders of magnitude", regardless of them being supported by evidence. There is some discussion of the topic in "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It."
SparrowOS 14y ago
God? You like beauty and beast? God says... C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT d say unto him, Didst not thou, my lord, O king, swear unto thine handmaid, saying, Assuredly Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne? why then doth Adonijah reign? 1:14 Behold, while thou yet talkest there with the king, I also will come in after thee, and confirm thy words. 1:15 And Bathsheba went in unto the king into the chamber: and the king was very old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered unto the king. 1:16 And Bathsheba bowed, and did obeisance unto th ---- dijon mustard? Oh, bad eye sight -- like Jacob and Esau.
sigsergv 14y ago
And forget about your experience! It doesn't matter at all! Only algorithms teasers and CLRS-excercises combination matter! Seriously, it becomes very stupid, a new profession has came: The Interview Specialist.
- noarchy 14y ago
  I'd figure that more interviewers would ask technology-specific questions, but it is hit-or-miss from what I've seen. For example: questions about Framework X or Y that your company actually uses. This would seem to be a lot more important than things that many haven't done since early CS courses (like algorithm gymnastics).
  - Serplat 14y ago
    The theory behind it is that material about specific frameworks is easily learned. If a company is looking to hire you, what you currently know matters far less than what you can learn. The best developers are able to master new frameworks in days or weeks, making their current experience near meaningless. So, instead of testing what you current know, many companies look to evaluate the way you think and your potential to learn. I'm sure that the current methods of doing this aren't perfect, but I think they're a hell of a lot better than asking me minute Hibernate details when I haven't used Hibernate in years. I currently prefer overall design questions. The type where the interviewer proposes an overarching problem, and you have to design a full system to handle it (not a difficult algorithm necessarily, but the data structures and classes involved). Mix this with a bit of actual coding, and I think the interviewer can get a decent idea of your skills.
    - mitchi 14y ago
      I agree with you. But I'm probably not teaching you anything by saying that mastering important frameworks like : - Win32 API - Write device drivers WDM or other - .NET / ASP.NET - Java standard library - Sockets, UNICODE - DOM, HTML, CSS, Javascript These things take a lot of time to learn properly. You have to read for a long time and know a lot of things. It's not true to say that anyone with algorithm smarts can do this.
jlarocco 14y ago
I really dislike the idea of "cramming" for interviews. If a person hasn't been developing problem solving and coding skills throughout their career, then it's hardly something they can read up on and develop in a week before an interview. In most cases, the point of coding interview questions is to see how a person goes about solving a problem as much as it is to see the solution. "I know this because I just read the solution in 'Interviewing for Dummies'" doesn't help at all.
- vertis 14y ago
  There is a very real disconnect between a lot of interviews (whiteboards, algorithms) and what people experience in the (current, prospective) job though. I've found actually pairing with the candidate to be a better measure than quizzing their knowledge of algorithms, etc.
- MattGrommes 14y ago
  It's not so much the problem solving and coding skills as the specific algorithm and syntax questions I tend to cram on. My memory is very pattern based so I'm not as good as randomly pulling some snippet up from memory but get me into that problem space and I can more easily give you what you're looking for. This is usually what happens in the real world but in interviews a lot of people just ask random questions with no connective tissue.
- scarmig 14y ago
  "I really dislike the idea of "cramming" for interviews. If a person hasn't been developing problem solving and coding skills throughout their career, then it's hardly something they can read up on and develop in a week before an interview." You're misunderstanding the issue here. For the type of things that matter in 95% of actual software, it's true that you can't learn all that in a week before an interview. However, those things are somewhat difficult to get across in a 60 minute interview, and good interviewers who can do that are rare. So they resort to algorithm questions because they don't require much skill to know. Which sucks but the interviewee can easily account for it by (re)learning that same stuff with a week of preparation, maybe a little more if they've got no experience in algorithms.
- 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
TinyBig 14y ago
For those with a some run time in this field: Is coding for interviews mostly distinct from coding in real life?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Cowen 14y ago
  It's the difference between solving a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle with the picture on the box, and solving a 100,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box.
- michaelt 14y ago
  A good interview question can be clearly defined in a few minutes, and it can be answered in a few minutes by someone with the general background shared by most programmers without reference to documentation. Regular coding requires that general background, but often involves larger (and less clearly defined) problems, more complex schemas, more lines of code, more working with other people, more supporting legacy code, and so on. To balance this greater complexity additional tools are available.
revskill 14y ago
To me, technology is the tool to make things run, but only good algorithms could optimize those running things.
h2s 14y ago
> Five essential books > To fully prepare for your programming interviews, > you should have access to information on at least > these five key topics: > I haven't read this yet myself > I haven't read this myself either > This book is new. As of this writing, the > book has not been released yet. Perhaps it > is the Effective C++ of Javascript. How strange. I've never seen anybody propose a reading list with so many books that they admittedly haven't read themselves. What's the point?
- cgag 14y ago
  They're affiliate links, if you buy anything off amazon within 24 hours of clicking one of them, he gets a cut.
  - bcjordan 14y ago
    Correct, that is how they work, but not my reasoning for including those books. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4997734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4997734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008406 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008406
- bcjordan 14y ago
  Just to clarify, as that quote juxtaposition might suggest otherwise, those three instances are from the same, fifth suggested book category—one book that goes in-depth on best practices for developing with "your favorite programming language". I point to five different programming language books, and I suggest you choose only one of those. > What's the point? Re: including pointers to books I haven't read, many solution submitters use python and C++ for their solutions and subsequent job interviews, so I wanted to offer them a good starting point, note my lack of experience with those books and save them some time. I spent a good hour researching what the in-depth language books might be for python, C++ and javascript and offered those suggestions. Re: the broader purpose of publishing a reading list, a few CS undergrads who read Coding for Interviews separately emailed me about books for interview preparation and general programming practice improvement. A lot of these books get discussed and read in book groups in the industry but not often in undergrad programs. I hope this helps clarify why I included those. Do you still feel I should remove them?

166 points by bcjordan 14y ago

I'm curious to hear others' suggestions, especially for the programming language books I haven't personally read. Just to note, those are Amazon affiliate links. Proceeds from Coding for Interviews all funnel back into the list's MailChimp fees (I just made it last month, and the list has grown a lot since then).

kubrickslair 14y ago
There is a book called 'Algorithms for Interviews' by Aziz & Prakash. It is much more CS centric than CareerCup & does not provide explicit solutions to all problems- which is good. It also has more difficult questions, on average, and many are not the kind that one would expect in an under hour interview. Nevertheless I find it more easy to read than something like say CareerCup, mainly because it is not so mundane and hence more fun.
- mikevm 14y ago
  They've released an update book which supersedes 'Algorithms for Interviews': http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews-Adnan-Aziz/dp/1479274836 http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews-Adnan-...
  - bcjordan 14y ago
    Will look into this, thanks for the pointer. Have you read it yet?
cgh 14y ago
Here are some that I really liked, which aren't "here's how to program" type books. I'm not going to repeat books that were mentioned in the OP, except to say...The Algorithm Design Manual. 1. Python Essential Reference - Beazley 2. Modern C++ Design - Alexandrescu (mind-blowing; he now works on the D language) 3. Internet Core Protocols: The Definitive Guide - Hall (not a work of any particular genius, but this is stuff everyone should know, in my opinion) 4. Applied Cryptography - Schneier 5. Think Bayes - Downey 6. Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches and Internetworking Protocols - Perlman
- naner 14y ago
  Schneier's Cryptography Engineering (previous ed. was called Practical Cryptography) would be a far more useful crypto book than Applied Cryptography. I believe Schneier himself even recommends skipping his seminal book.
- bcjordan 14y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions, just ordered a copy of Internet Core Protocols. Are you familiar with either Expert Python Programming or Effective C++? Would you suggest Python Essential Reference and/or Modern C++ Design over either of those for undergrads preparing for interviews in those languages?
andrewcooke 14y ago
i was impressed by peopleware, maybe because it agreed with my prejudices. i doubt it's going to help you with interviews as it's more about culture, but it's a fairly slim book that's worth the read (more than mythical man month, imho).
rachelbythebay 14y ago
Your page is difficult to read at lunch on my iOS device because you have those floating social doodads on one side. They obscure your content and I don't want to fight it. This may affect your response rates. Just saying.
- bcjordan 14y ago
  Wow, that is terrible, sorry for the eyesore. If you're still interested, try it now. It should hide for mobile browsers.

bjhoops1 14y ago

One of those mentioned in this article that I thought was particularly great was GUI Bloopers. I read this in college and when I went to work in the industry I was almost immediately tagged as a developer with a "good eye for design" (we had no actual designers) despite having had literally no other GUI experience. This is a fantastic read that should be required reading for everyone in The Enterprise. (Of course, with this newfound awareness comes massive frustration working on Enterprise applications which routinely serve as anti-patterns of UI design)

diego_moita 14y ago

The problem with any book list like this is the scope. Software is turning into a very diverse culture, a very heterogeneous ecosystem. Subjects that are very important to one area might not be as important to other areas. Design patterns are essential for enterprise development, not so much for AI and low level systems programming. Algorithms are essential for the latest but not for the former. Given this, there are some books you might add or remove depending on the area you are interested (e.g.: Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming", Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture", ...) To finish, 2 books people recommend a lot for beginning programmers: "The Pragmatic Programmer"- Hunt, Thomas: a very good book, with sound advice and very easy to read. The only bad side is that it became so influential that its ideas became vulgarized in thousands of blogs. "Code Complete" - Steve McConnel : A very dangerous book. It does give have a lot of sound advice. But, IMO, it has some big problems. First is that it gives the false impression that there is a lot of empirical evidence on what works on software engineering. Second, it perpetuates some myths that don't have such evidence: the "orders of magnitude programmer's productivity" and "the cone of uncertainty" (see: https://leanpub.com/leprechauns https://leanpub.com/leprechauns).

tellarin 14y ago
I overall agree with you on "Code Complete", but where did you find data that disproves 'orders of magnitude programmer's productivity'? I can't reach the linked website. I'd be genuinely interested to check that. While still anecdotal, my experience from working in big and small companies in 4 countries is that there certainly is a absurdly wide gap in productivity between programmers.
- tjpick 14y ago
  Original source FOR the "orders of magnitude" claim seem to usually point back to Fred Brooks Mythical Man Month (5-10x) or Robert Glass (Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering) 28x. I don't think either of these multipliers are accurately expressed as "orders of magnitude", regardless of them being supported by evidence. There is some discussion of the topic in "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It."

SparrowOS 14y ago

God? You like beauty and beast? God says... C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT d say unto him, Didst not thou, my lord, O king, swear unto thine handmaid, saying, Assuredly Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne? why then doth Adonijah reign? 1:14 Behold, while thou yet talkest there with the king, I also will come in after thee, and confirm thy words. 1:15 And Bathsheba went in unto the king into the chamber: and the king was very old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered unto the king. 1:16 And Bathsheba bowed, and did obeisance unto th ---- dijon mustard? Oh, bad eye sight -- like Jacob and Esau.

sigsergv 14y ago

And forget about your experience! It doesn't matter at all! Only algorithms teasers and CLRS-excercises combination matter! Seriously, it becomes very stupid, a new profession has came: The Interview Specialist.

noarchy 14y ago
I'd figure that more interviewers would ask technology-specific questions, but it is hit-or-miss from what I've seen. For example: questions about Framework X or Y that your company actually uses. This would seem to be a lot more important than things that many haven't done since early CS courses (like algorithm gymnastics).
- Serplat 14y ago
  The theory behind it is that material about specific frameworks is easily learned. If a company is looking to hire you, what you currently know matters far less than what you can learn. The best developers are able to master new frameworks in days or weeks, making their current experience near meaningless. So, instead of testing what you current know, many companies look to evaluate the way you think and your potential to learn. I'm sure that the current methods of doing this aren't perfect, but I think they're a hell of a lot better than asking me minute Hibernate details when I haven't used Hibernate in years. I currently prefer overall design questions. The type where the interviewer proposes an overarching problem, and you have to design a full system to handle it (not a difficult algorithm necessarily, but the data structures and classes involved). Mix this with a bit of actual coding, and I think the interviewer can get a decent idea of your skills.
  - mitchi 14y ago
    I agree with you. But I'm probably not teaching you anything by saying that mastering important frameworks like : - Win32 API - Write device drivers WDM or other - .NET / ASP.NET - Java standard library - Sockets, UNICODE - DOM, HTML, CSS, Javascript These things take a lot of time to learn properly. You have to read for a long time and know a lot of things. It's not true to say that anyone with algorithm smarts can do this.

jlarocco 14y ago

I really dislike the idea of "cramming" for interviews. If a person hasn't been developing problem solving and coding skills throughout their career, then it's hardly something they can read up on and develop in a week before an interview. In most cases, the point of coding interview questions is to see how a person goes about solving a problem as much as it is to see the solution. "I know this because I just read the solution in 'Interviewing for Dummies'" doesn't help at all.

vertis 14y ago
There is a very real disconnect between a lot of interviews (whiteboards, algorithms) and what people experience in the (current, prospective) job though. I've found actually pairing with the candidate to be a better measure than quizzing their knowledge of algorithms, etc.
MattGrommes 14y ago
It's not so much the problem solving and coding skills as the specific algorithm and syntax questions I tend to cram on. My memory is very pattern based so I'm not as good as randomly pulling some snippet up from memory but get me into that problem space and I can more easily give you what you're looking for. This is usually what happens in the real world but in interviews a lot of people just ask random questions with no connective tissue.
scarmig 14y ago
"I really dislike the idea of "cramming" for interviews. If a person hasn't been developing problem solving and coding skills throughout their career, then it's hardly something they can read up on and develop in a week before an interview." You're misunderstanding the issue here. For the type of things that matter in 95% of actual software, it's true that you can't learn all that in a week before an interview. However, those things are somewhat difficult to get across in a 60 minute interview, and good interviewers who can do that are rare. So they resort to algorithm questions because they don't require much skill to know. Which sucks but the interviewee can easily account for it by (re)learning that same stuff with a week of preparation, maybe a little more if they've got no experience in algorithms.
14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

TinyBig 14y ago

For those with a some run time in this field: Is coding for interviews mostly distinct from coding in real life?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Cowen 14y ago
It's the difference between solving a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle with the picture on the box, and solving a 100,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box.
michaelt 14y ago
A good interview question can be clearly defined in a few minutes, and it can be answered in a few minutes by someone with the general background shared by most programmers without reference to documentation. Regular coding requires that general background, but often involves larger (and less clearly defined) problems, more complex schemas, more lines of code, more working with other people, more supporting legacy code, and so on. To balance this greater complexity additional tools are available.

revskill 14y ago

To me, technology is the tool to make things run, but only good algorithms could optimize those running things.

h2s 14y ago

> Five essential books > To fully prepare for your programming interviews, > you should have access to information on at least > these five key topics: > I haven't read this yet myself > I haven't read this myself either > This book is new. As of this writing, the > book has not been released yet. Perhaps it > is the Effective C++ of Javascript. How strange. I've never seen anybody propose a reading list with so many books that they admittedly haven't read themselves. What's the point?

cgag 14y ago
They're affiliate links, if you buy anything off amazon within 24 hours of clicking one of them, he gets a cut.
- bcjordan 14y ago
  Correct, that is how they work, but not my reasoning for including those books. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4997734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4997734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008406 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008406
bcjordan 14y ago
Just to clarify, as that quote juxtaposition might suggest otherwise, those three instances are from the same, fifth suggested book category—one book that goes in-depth on best practices for developing with "your favorite programming language". I point to five different programming language books, and I suggest you choose only one of those. > What's the point? Re: including pointers to books I haven't read, many solution submitters use python and C++ for their solutions and subsequent job interviews, so I wanted to offer them a good starting point, note my lack of experience with those books and save them some time. I spent a good hour researching what the in-depth language books might be for python, C++ and javascript and offered those suggestions. Re: the broader purpose of publishing a reading list, a few CS undergrads who read Coding for Interviews separately emailed me about books for interview preparation and general programming practice improvement. A lot of these books get discussed and read in book groups in the industry but not often in undergrad programs. I hope this helps clarify why I included those. Do you still feel I should remove them?