CTCI gives you a great birds-eye view of the relevant data structures and algorithms, but it doesn’t get deep enough into the fundamentals. FANG interviews are notorious for being very difficult because the problems are designed to test your fundamentals and your ability to apply them.
CTCI’s approachability is its downfall here. It’s designed to be a great resource for engineers looking to get a job at a mid-size or non-fang company. It’s meant to be a book you can study, take 30 interviews, and eventually, you’ll see something you saw in the book and get a job. Any developer looking to land a non-fang level company should consider using this book.
The problem with FANG interviews is you don’t have 30 chances and the odds of getting 5 interview questions directly out of the book are slim to none. There will always be a success story about how someone just did CTCI problems and landed the job. This is the exception to the rule. With Fang interviews, you need to prepare for problems you’ve never seen before. To do that you need a resource that gets into the thick of it.
Buy The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skienna instead
Top comments (4)
For me, I already learned the concepts in depth. I have a whole degree in CS. CTCI is a refresher. If you expect to get a degree's worth of depth, then yes, it's a bad book. If the knowledge is already there, just a bit disconnected or fuzzy, I think it helps significantly.
That sounds like a very atypical CS degree if it taught you all the things in CTCI! I think you are very lucky! My CS Degree wasn't so robust. It had neither the breadth nor depth of even CTCI.
Well, I don't know if it was too special. There is one course, usually has Algorithms in the title, that discusses sorting, recursion, etc. Another called Data Structures discusses arrays, linked lists, etc. In all my applications for undergrad and grad school I have never seen a school without these two.
Agree completely!