PREFACE
Solving problems that are presented in programming interviews requires a separate skillset from what you need to be a good programmer. Just like anything else, you probably won’t be very good at this when you first start, but you can develop and improve your skills just as we did. This book is the first step in that process; through this book we leverage your programming expertise to rapidly turn you into an expert at programming interviews.
Since the first edition, Programming Interviews Exposed has effectively established a new topic area of programming books, and now a multitude of websites, blogs, and forums provide advice and sample questions. With all that available, why should you invest your time and money in this book?
Our focus continues to be on teaching you the techniques and approaches you need to be successful in programming interviews. We reinforce these by illustrating the thought process that leads to the solution of each of the problems we present, and show you how to move forward when you’re stuck. These skills overlap with general coding skills, but they’re not the same; we’ve seen great coders crash and burn in programming interviews because they haven’t developed their interview skills. Early in our careers we crashed and burned a couple times ourselves, but you can avoid that by beginning your preparation with this book. Once you’ve learned the skills taught in this book you’ll continue to learn by applying them to the problems you find in other books and on the web, but this is the book you want to start with.
One thing that never changes is that to become good at solving programming interview questions, you have to do more than passively read about them: you need to practice them. You’ll get a lot more out of this book if you work out as much of each solution as you can on your own before you read about it.
Although the content of the book has expanded significantly since the first edition and the languages employed have shifted, we’ve stayed true to the goals and approach we set out then, described in the original preface, which follows.
