Cracking the Coding Interview, 4 Edition - 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions

Before the Interview | Technical Preparation
How to Prepare for Technical Questions
You’ve purchased this book, so you’ve already gone a long way towards good preparation.
Nice work!
That said, there are better and worse ways to prepare. Many candidates just read through
problems and solutions. Don’t do that! Memorizing or trying to learn specific questions
won’t help you! Rather, do this:
1. Try to solve the problem on your own. I mean, really try to solve it. Many questions
are designed to be tough - that’s ok! When you’re solving a problem, make sure to
think about the space and time efficiency. Ask yourself if you could improve the time
efficiency by reducing the space efficiency, or vice versa.
2. Write the code for the algorithm on paper. You’ve been coding all your life on a computer,
and you’ve gotten used to the many nice things about it. But, in your interview,
you won’t have the luxury of syntax highlighting, code completion, or compiling.
Mimic this situation by coding on paper.
3. Type your paper code as-is into a computer. You’ll probably have made a bunch of
mistakes. Start a list of all the mistakes you made, so that you can keep these in mind
in the real interview.
4. Do a mock interview. CareerCup offers a mock interview service, or you can grab a
friend to ask you questions. Though your friend may not be an expert interviewer, he
or she may still be able to walk you through a coding or algorithm question.
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Cracking the Coding Interview