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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this book or any books for that matter are particularly useful for interviews unless you want to learn the extreme basics. However, if you are trying to learn the basics, I'm not sure that this book or EPI, etc. is enough to be prepared for a real interview.

The best way really is to grind Leetcode, unfortunately, and using ChatGPT to ask questions and explain answers or topics. ChatGPT is very good at explaining well-defined things like CS topics and LC answers in my opinion. It most likely slurped the contents of this book and you can ask it questions directly so I think that's probably the way I will do it in the future.

In addition, the book doesn't seem to cover systems design which is an extremely critical part of the interview process for L4 and above.

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> In addition, the book doesn't seem to cover systems design which is an extremely critical part of the interview process for L4 and above.

It's called Cracking the *Coding* Interview for a reason. We don't talk about databases or concurrency or system design or meta-programming or any other topics that would take an entire other textbook to cover. It would be impossible to do it justice.

The book is not just basics. I've read most of the technical chapters and it is quite in depth. More so than any online resource. Plus there is the AI interviewer which is free and probably better than trying to prompt chatgpt yourself.

Agreed. The book talks about niche topics in more depth than most resources online. In addition to all the topics in the book, we're actively releasing free online chapters each month covering more niche topics found in interviews.

> trying to prompt chatgpt yourself

These days, I can't even be bothered. Sometimes I type 2 words may be 3 and o3 will do all the CoT style prompting on its own. I don't mind the wait.

o3 is wonderful in exploring codebases, especially on GitHub Chat.

These kinds of books have really progressed since they first appeared -- this one could probably be fairly re-marketed as a two-volume set of 1. an advanced CS textbook and 2. a SWE candidate handbook, especially given the online resources and AI interviewer they have.

I have heard of people saying grind leetcode but that never made any sense to me. Does leetcode go over database design and development basics? The best jobs I ever had never needed me to grind on some meaningless test because they knew how to conduct quality interviews.

This book is definitely the opposite of "grind leetcode", fwiw.

Appreciate the comment, and you're completely right. Our whole thesis is that doing what everybody else is doing will get you the same results that everybody else is getting. :)

Oh I know, but my point is not every interview is covered by this process that seems to screen for college grads or people who memorize things better.

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