How to use Cracking The Coding Interview Effectively

hi I'm Gail lucknow author of cracking the coding interview in today's topic is one you don't in this video we're gonna talk about how to use this book this very famous coding interview book cracking the coding interview how can we use this effectively this book is huge but I always seem to find myself coming back to it when I have interviews coming up even with all these new resources like leak code and hacker rank and everything on there on the Internet this book still has a ton of value especially for how cheap it is so do people read this entire book yeah I don't think so this books about 700 pages so it's I don't know it's more it's more for you know looking stuff up and doing certain things in specific areas of the book that you need help with now Gail is super smart I've watched a ton of her videos on the YouTube like hacker ranked page and stuff like that she is so qualified to you know give us this information and her writing style in this book is really nice like there's a lot of coding books that get really confusing a lot of people that write text books and stuff like that they use this technical jargon and they think things are simpler than it actually is Gail writes it in a really easy way for people to understand so I give credit to that first thing I would say is read the first chapter I think the first chapter has a lot of value and this is something that isn't really out there on the internet all in one spot like it is in this book the first chapter kind of just explains everything about the interview process it even talks about specific companies and the differences between interview processes especially that big companies if you want to know after this first chapter there's a section about before the interview or that she has this preparation map and this kind of just goes through like how we would use this book to study for the interview and I guess you could follow this I never followed this because there's so many other things I would recommend doing instead of reading through this whole book and following this preparation map but I do like that they had some kind of strategy for using this book now the way I use this book is I read a few chapters that I thought I was lacking information in but before I would read into certain sections the chapter I would go over to youtube and watch these hacker Inc videos they're super good like 10 15 minute explanations for each data structure for different methods like BFS DFS binary search like all of these videos are readily available online at YouTube and stuff and they make it so easy to understand when you read things I often find that I don't retain information as well as I do from a video just because there's visuals there now I actually was struggling with Big O notation for a while I didn't really understand how important time and space complexity was for these interviews and I didn't I kind of just thought oh you get a problem and you kind of figure out how to solve it in the interview but you really need to understand that I like algorithms are based on these time and space constraints and that is the whole point of these interviews is that you understand and know how to improve on these so her section on Big O notation in this book I definitely recommend reading this part too because this is where I understood for the first time there's a lot of these like recurrence videos and like hard mathematical jargon in like I took the Stanford course I took like some california school course on Coursera and the way they explain time and space complexity just isn't that simple and this was just really good for me to read when I first read this and she explained how you know two separate for loops was too when because you're looping through all the elements twice but nesting the four loops is o of N squared like the way that she explained it in this little chapter I kind of started to understand it for the first time now after this point I wouldn't say that there's a must-read chapter the rest of this is kind of just informational stuff that you know they have chapters on data structures and stuff but you can also find this stuff online there's a million practice questions in here that I did go through right so there's these websites online where you know likely code hacker hang million other ones to where you can code in the browser and actually solve these problems so I use those a lot of the time but what you need to understand is in these interviews you're gonna be doing whiteboarding and a lot of these companies so when I want to do whiteboarding this is a great book there's some really unique questions that aren't on these websites that are in this book there's the solutions in here and this is a good book cuz you can carry it around from place to place obviously you can carry your laptop but it's super simple right you have a backpack you pull it out and you go somewhere with a white board and you could practice with these problems maybe come with someone else else and then they can look at the book and you can do the white boarding so this is a good book for doing white boarding practice is what I use this for specifically there's a bunch of chapters in here that really aren't even necessary for the technical interview in most cases right there's like databases there's testing math and logic puzzles system design and scalability like a lot of this stuff you know you might not necessarily be dealing with if you're doing a junior level position you know maybe you're not doing system design that much so you don't need to read that right don't don't just look at this book and think oh I have to know everything in this book right not everything is needed from this book another good section that isn't like something you have to read but I found it helpful is hints for concepts and algorithms she gives actually throughout this book in this chapter and like throughout the whole thing it's almost like giving you self-help but for coding so you read these self-help books and people say write down things you're grateful for and like restructure how you think and stuff like that and she kind of gives you like almost like self-help for how you think about the coding interview and stuff like that and how you think about approaching problems so pay attention to like I just think her thinking style is really good for answering problems and passing these interviews so maybe just try and readjust your mind a little bit if you find something helpful in here maybe take it and implement it in your daily life right you know she has really good hints as far as topics that you know if you wanted to read and use this book mainly I do like trees and graphs I read stacks and queues anything about data structures that's gonna be helpful right bit manipulation I would hold off on because I don't see that coming up in interviews that much I would look at recursion dynamic programming you know most of these topics are pretty good there's a chapter on threads and locks that's not necessarily gonna come up although it could in some interviews I actually have had that come up just talking about it on the phone maybe in a phone interview with someone I've actually had to talk about you know threading and stuff like that quite a bit so it could be good depending on what company you're going for so just just maybe ask your recruiter the style of the interview beforehand ask if you're gonna be doing a lot of algorithms and data structures and if you are focus on that stuff more or if you're going to be doing more practical stuff maybe focus on that more the book is really a full guide it's like this huge book of information and depending on where you're interviewing at you can use certain sections so you need to understand where you're interviewing and what your interview is going to consist of to use this book properly so that's the first step ask your recruiter what is going to come up in this interview if it's data structures and algorithms focus on those more if it's going to be more practical stuff focus on that more there are some chapters for all of that stuff in this book and you're going to want to stick to the specific chapters that will be coming up in your interview so that's it I do recommend if you're really just trying to get into the data structures algorithms fart watching these videos online while you look through and read this book you know I find it really helpful looking at how different people explain the same concept so maybe read about arrays in this book and then learn about arrays from two different youtubers and then learn about arrays from a couple of blogs see the differences and similarities and how people are explaining and find you know shape your mentality right just like how people should watch news people should look at a bunch of different news sources and kind of aggregate that information and form a perspective you should do that with computer science information especially when it comes to something as important as getting a job you don't want to come in and say something stupid because one resource gave you the wrong information so shape your understanding this book in general does have a lot of like solid information though I wouldn't really say there's gonna be anything bad in here but try and look at a few other resources to you know solidify your understanding especially so you can retain this information as well so watch videos while you do this read blogs while you do this and just look at multiple resources at the same time so that's all my advice I love this book I have a love-hate relationship with this book right cuz you know I end up reading it every time I get sick of it but it is amazing you know I come to it every time even with even with li coat even with everything else you know I do always crack open at least one or two chapters of this book whenever I'm preparing for the interview it just gets you in the right headspace that's it for this video guys thank you gale for creating the book and you know I'd love to do a collab with you PL so if you guys know Gayle let her know that I'm interested in collabing thank you I know seriously thank you guys for watching appreciate you guys please like and subscribe so I can grow my channel and if you'd like to support me on patreon I'm not gonna argue against that and I appreciate it where the does that link is in the description thank you guys for watching and I will see you in the next video maybe some coding problems maybe someone else we'll see alright peace

Channel: Nick White

Views: 156,001

Rating: 4.940474 out of 5

Keywords: cracking the coding interview, coding, programming, algorithms, data structures, coding interview, computer science, how to use cracking the coding interview, how to use cracking the coding interview effectively, programming interview, developer, engineering, software engineering, software development, technical interview, nick white, google, fang

Id: yG0RhKFTonw

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020