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Comment by posharma | Hacker News Reader

Keeping your coding skills sharp always helps with interviewing when changing jobs.

I'd be rich if I had a dollar for every student who told me "I understand the concepts but I can't do the problems" in math or physics and then in debugging their problem solving it became clear that they don't understand the concepts at all.

There is nothing like doing the problem sets when it comes to learning something like math or computer science. If you did the problem sets successfully but didn't read anything else or go to lectures you pass the class.

Lately I decided I was going to completely understand Java Generics (like how exactly the solver works) and found that there weren't any good books or web pages on the subject, instead I was going to have to read Chapter 18 the Java Language Specification as many times as it takes and come up with my own problem set. (I just wish I had a way of making a unit test that "passes" if the function doesn't compile!)

Not my area of expertise, but wouldn't most compiler books have chapters on generics work for general languages? You could use that to reason on how Java generics work.

That's not a bad idea but in the case of Java you have the source code for the compiler and you can just look at that. (e.g. different generic systems are possible, I want to learn how to make the most of this one.)

Leetcode might help with interviewing, but I’d say that’s about it. I don’t think I’d optimize my general learning and discovery with trying to pass arbitrary interviews.

Real world coding has very little to do with leet code problems. Debugging, problem solving, diving deep into legacy code and reducing or skillfully dealing with complexity. That’s more like real life.

Keeping your coding skills sharp always helps with interviewing when changing jobs.

So what? How much of your time do you spend changing jobs, versus everything else you do?

Preparing for interviews for specifically those companies that do leetcode style interviews is a very narrow use case and one that's only useful if you actually intend to interview for such a position soonish. I'd say that books are, as a category, incomparably more broadly useful.

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