Name: Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview
ISBN: 9781955706001

What Hacker News says

BeetleBOct 2026

Just lots of practice.

I guess what I meant is that if you've read stuff like Cracking The Coding Interview and taken an undergrad algorithms/data structure course - that's sufficient knowledge for Leetcode style problem.

The additional stuff in TCPH was fun to read/learn, but I never used it to solve any of those problems.

A note: In my last round of interviewing, I read Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview (the sequel), and the tips it gives for technical coding problems were great - much better than the original book. I can't say it helped getting a job, because the job I did get had its interview just before I read that book.

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neilvFeb 2025

> Technical interviews are much harder today than they used to be. Engineers study for months and routinely get down-leveled despite that. Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, in addition to covering a bunch of new questions and topics, teaches you how to think instead of memorizing. Grinding and memorization isn’t the way in this market (though in fairness, it’s never really the way). With us, you’ll still have to do the work, of course, but we’ll teach you to work smarter.

It's like they're doubling-down on the steaming load of BS that is the techbro interview.

Please permit me to share my 'review' of the original book, which I made when I gave away my copy on an MIT-internal free-stuff email list.

> Date: Friday, October 20, 2023 7:53:39 AM

> Subject: [Reuse] "cracking the coding interview" book of satan

> "Cracking the Coding Interview" 6th Edition

> I literally just opened this book to a random page, about 1/3 of the way through, and the first thing I read on the page was, "You should first ask your interviewer if the string is an ASCII or a Unicode string. Asking this question will show an eye for detail and a solid foundation in computer science." With no hint that the writer was aware of the irony.

> However, since some successful tech companies were founded during the dotcom boom by students with no professional experience, they adopted hiring filters based around a cocky student's idea of what is important in software engineering. Then, subsequent startups, without the benefit of dotcom gold rush handing gobs of money to anyone who could spell "HTML", looked at those companies that had a lot of money, and thought "I, too, want a lot of money, so I should mimic whatever that big company with tens of thousands of worker drone employees does." Now we have a whole lot of startups who are filtering their hiring with a mix of fratbro hazing rituals, and attacking anyone who climbs the ladder in the middle of the room to reach the bananas.

> This book will tell you not to climb the ladder to reach the bananas. Simultaneously, it will rot your brain, crush your soul, and make you a terrible person when you're later on the other side of the interviewing table and you inflict it upon someone else.

> Unfortunately, I have old-school conditioning against destroying books,no matter how offensive and harmful.

> TO CLAIM: Please email me and say *which day* you promise you will no-contact pick up, in Mid-Cambridge.

> TO NOT CLAIM: Kudos, and maybe you join me in telling companies who recommend this book as interview prep material, "No, thank you".

(Epilogue: That copy of the book went to someone who responded, "As a linguist (and ex CS person) who is now considering selling her soul to big tech because academia is not a lot more better, I'd be interested in this cursed book!")

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michael_mroczkaFeb 2025

Hey, I know Shaun personally, and I think his book is excellent. Our books, despite seeming similar, are very different. His is about recognizing preset patterns, and that is about the extent of it. No outreach advice, negotiation strategies, resume opinions, behavioral help, etc. His book also seems to focus heavily on quantity, as he ends up going through 100+ leetcode problems.

I'd heartily endorse his book, but they definitely are more different than similar. EPI is also another excellent book with a very different style.

Here is a link to nine chapters of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview for free in case you're still curious about it: https://bctci.co/free-chapters

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RonSkufcaJun 2025

Even though I am not actively looking for work I am reading Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview. https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Cracking-Coding-Interview-Succ.... It’s a dense read and I find myself oddly attracted to mulling over the questions and trying various solutions. I would be doing yard work, walking, hiking, biking and thinking about how to best solve the question I attempted yesterday. I feel more interested in solving the problems the same way people work crossword puzzles or attempt those 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles than trying to game the interview process.

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leenyMay 2025

Hey HN, I'm Aline, founder of interviewing.io and one of the authors of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview (the official sequel to CTCI).

We just compiled every problem (and solution) in the book and made them available for free. There are ~230 problems in total. Some of them are classics like n-queens, but almost all are new and not found in the original CTCI.

You can read through the problems and solutions, or you work them with our AI Interviewer, which is also free. I'd recommend doing AI Interviewer before you read the solutions, but you can do it in whichever order you like. (When you first get into AI Interviewer, you can configure which topics you want problems on, and at what difficulty level, and you can add topics and change difficulty levels as you go.)

Here's the link: https://start.interviewing.io/beyond-ctci/all-problems/techn... (You'll have to create an account if you don't already have one, but there's nothing else you need to do to access all the things.)

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leenyFeb 2025

Hey, my name is Aline. I'm one of the authors of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview and the founder of interviewing.io.

I have also wondered about the arms race and how it weighs against market forces for the bar going up, especially because as founder of an interview prep platform, I am complicit in said arms race and don't feel great about it (though I think the good of starting interviewing.io far outweighs the bad, but that's a story for another time).

So I looked at the data.

Between 2015 and the first half of 2022, I'd argue that "the bar" was about the same, even though a bunch of interview prep resources sprung up during that time (interviewing.io was founded in 2015, Leetcode was, Pramp was, Triplebyte was, HackerRank was a few years earlier, the list goes on).

Then, the tech downturn happened in 2022, and all of a sudden the bar jumped... because for the first time companies didn't feel like there was an acute shortage of candidates.

Here's some the data about the bar. At interviewing.io, after each interview, whether it's mock or real, the interviewer fills out a rubric. The rubric asks whether you'd move the candidate forward and also asks to rate them on a scale of 1 to 4 on coding ability, problem solving ability, and communication.

We can look at what the average coding score was over time for passing interviews to see how much the bar has gone up.

Between 2016 and 2022, the bar grew a bit (from 3.3 to 3.4). Starting in 2022, it shot up to 3.7. Is this the be-all and end-all? Of course not. But to me this is compelling data that market forces >>> the interview prep industry.

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