Everything I learned | Month 4| Encora/Nearsoft Academy

Hi everyone! 🤗

Welcome to another special edition blog where I will tell you what are my lessons for the whole month, the 4th phase. This time I learned everything about how to be interviewed and the process of how to excel in these situations. Let’s start!

— — — 🌶 Cracking the Coding Interview 🌶 — — —

I have heard of this book for almost four years, I have not had the opportunity to read it until this time, and wow! if I realized how amazing and complete this book before, I might be applying to the big names!

The book is divided into three sections, the process, the knowledge, and the practice. The first part, talks about everything you need to know, and I mean, everything about the recruitment process on any major tech company, from the email receiving to the offering talk. This part was my personal favorite, as being part of the process you want to know how everything is going, and sometimes the weeks pass by without a single response.

In the second third of the book, Gayle explains everything you need to know for the interviews, from the basics of the Big O notation to software design questions that may be applied to the interview depending on the level you are going to. In this part, I should say that some concepts may have good explanations but sometimes it lacks good examples that would enrich the concept understanding. Even though, that would be easily replaced by the following part.

The practice section enriches the experience and knowledge presented in the previous two sections, and you are totally inspired by putting your success story into what was presented. In this part, all of the exercises have possible answers in all the programming languages you may want to use. Also, the community that supports the book online provides guidance and some useful tricks that may help your specific solution in the determined language.

— — — 🍪 Elements of Programming Interviews 🍪— — —

This book was not my favorite one of the month, although we only have two to read. The reason behind my feelings is that it does not have a structure to hype the reader for preparing itself, instead, it was more difficult and heavy to read, similar to the books I had in high school, maybe that was the reason I did not like it that much.

But don’t get me wrong, the book is full of useful ideas and concepts that are straightforward and concise enough to be the answer in one of your interviews.

Also, the major advantage/disadvantage is that the book does have different types, there are the C++, Java, and Python versions you may want to explore. One disadvantage is that the content varies greatly between all of them, But the great advantage is that you may have the best preparation for an interview in a specific language. Maybe in the future, I would like to see a JavaScript or Go version.

Finally, the book also contains exercises with code you may find on the internet and guides you through each step, which is very convenient when you are stuck in some problem and want some hint to continue.

— — — ⛰ Final Thoughts ⛰ — — —

Preparing for a big interview is a race you would never end, there are always new things that may come by and increase or decrease the scope of what you think to know. And also this career path has the particularity of making knowledge and practice tests to allow someone to be hired, even if the things asked in the interview do not match what you may end doing during the day-to-day at the job. For that reason, interviewing is something you always have to practice and learn, there is no other way of cracking the system.

Thank you for reading until here!

See you! 👋🏽