I rarely write an amazon product review before. But couple of days ago, one of the authors, Tsung-Hsien Lee actually contacted me regarding one of the bugs I submitted when I used the book to prepare for my interview. I thought the bug report will not be responded, but to my surprise, Tsung-Hsien sent me a personal email saying thank you and also updated version of the code. To people who are interested in the question, it is the question of finding the maximum rectangle area under the skyline.
A little bit on my background, I only ever take one introduction to algorithm class in college, where it teaches required fundamentals such as hash, trees, graphs, divide and conquer, etc. I read this book by the recommendation of my internship mentor, he probably knows best the limit of my programming experience, and he told me to just focus and read one book for interview prep. I took his advice deeply, and at the time, although I have the other book (cracking the code interview), I decided to just spend my time and effort in EPI.
The first time experience reading this book is harsh. I spent the entire day just trying to read solution and understand what it means for the entire day. The solution presented is terse, but this is what you would be expected if you go in for interview. Not too much BS, just straight ideas and to the point. But for people out there worrying about difficulty of this book, my advice is to skip some uncomfortable chapters first (for me, it was the binary, numbers and primitives), focus more on the recursive section (which I found it to be very consistently structured and explained). Spend at least 1 to two weeks grinding through the pain, and I promise it will get easier as it goes.
There are advices to always come up with your own solution first before reading the book's solution. I dont know. Maybe if you are already experienced, that will work to stimulate your long lost problem solving instinct. But my strategy was to sit down read the entire chapters, really understand (dont lie to yourself). And do it the second round without looking (or at least try not looking). I found the second time read around was a great opportunity for me to come up with my own structures (which I am sure each people have their own) for answering the questions.
Overall, I spent 3 solid months preparing using this book. I do get several offers from the usual big companies and some smaller companies. While there will always be questions that is out of the book, at least I would say, 80 to 90% of the interview questions I had (~20 interviews) are taken verbatim from this book. So if you even memorized the book, you will pass the minimal requirement for technical interviews. Of course, go online and search for questions that appear in individual companies, esp smaller companies/startups. You will be surprised how "not big" the pool of questions for coding interview is.
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Great resource for taking your theory knowledge and applying it to problem solving
Background: I bought the previous version of this book (the C++ one titled Elements of Programming Interviews: The Insiders' Guide) and posted a review that I found it very useful, but the print was too small for me and I was more versed in Java than C++. I was then contacted by the authors and they graciously offered a free advance copy of this book, the Java version with bigger font. The book is essentially the same as the previous one, but the larger type makes it a lot easier on my eyes (I'm at that age where I'm finding that I have to get fine print *away* from my eyes to focus properly), and the Java is much more familiar to me, although since the problems are algorithmic by nature you don't see much difference in the code (which is a good thing - these books are not about specific turns and tricks of C++ or Java, it's about solving problems with a good algorithm, and then it's implemented in C++ or Java). So if you prefer C++ and don't have problems with small type, go with the original one. If you must have the more comfortable type and/or Java, this is the one. (See pictures for size and code comparison) As for the content, I found it extremely useful. Mind you, it assumes you have knowledge of the basics and not so basics of data structures, sorting, dynamic programming, recursion, etc. If you do not have this knowledge, this book won't be of much use. The value of this book is showing a ton of questions where these foundation topics are applied to problem solving. I found that even reading through the problems (without trying to solve) and their solutions gave insight, and certain tricks and problem solving strategies and patterns emerge. This step is the crucial one, as just the raw knowledge won't get you through that interview. You will need to apply it to the scenario that the interviewer presents you with. This book will help you with that part. I, for one, am very glad that I bought this book.
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