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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I like Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick. It's a great book. He also has free online courses based on the books that are of excellent quality:

- https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part1

- https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part2

There's a website for the book as well, that has code that is well organized and commented.

Unfortunately excellent books like "Programming Pearls" have code examples that use weird naming conventions that just make me just want to punch the wall.

For competitive programming and interviews, Antti Laaksonen's books are fantastic: https://www.cses.fi/book/index.php

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I’ve heard that Part 1 of the algorithms course is sufficient for new grad interviews. Can you verify?

I got an interview that involved part 2 (substring search), which I solved using KMP.

senior interview or new grad?

Phone interview for a senior role, not onsite.

> I’ve heard that Part 1 of the algorithms course is sufficient for new grad interviews

It sounds like you got hazed.

I still don’t understand why these software interviews do this. Especially when the work in question, is derivative, and mostly just reformulating other ideas and libraries.

It’s like, how often are you going to have to reinvent your own Red Black Binary Search Tree to solve some obscure business problem? Most of the time, the business doesn’t give a damn. Just throw your data into a database, and be done with it. Then use some queries to filter through your data, and get the data you need to solve the problem at hand.

And usually, by looking at someone’s code style, you know how good they really are. You can determine, if (1) they are at a hackerish level and their code has bugs and occasionally breaks, or (2) if their code is really solid software engineering level quality that’s airtight and can survive anything you throw at it.

I prefer these interviews rather than take-home projects, which usually take longer and can be cheated.

A company once sent me a really long take home exercise that took like 3 full days to implement to completion. I said: no thanks, and in the same 3 days I had multiple interviews and even got an offer.

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