Many people would say “all” software engineers will want to work on a FAANG company at least once. I wouldn’t generalize because many of us end up following other dreams, in my case, for example, I love working remotely, programming and tech writing. Because of the above, I will say, “many” software engineers may eventually get an interview with a FAANG company, and here is my list of code interview resources for them.
If you have read this far and you are still wondering what does FAANG means, let’s take a look at a definition from Investopedia:
In finance, “FAANG” is an acronym that refers to the stocks of five prominent American technology companies: Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Netflix (NFLX), and Alphabet (GOOG) (formerly known as Google).
Even though now I know clearly remote is my thing, a couple of years ago I was following the path of interviewing with them. Asides from the fact that even getting to interview with them is amazing and flattering, it is also a great lesson. Those interviews are no joke and if you don’t prepare for them, most likely you will fail. But the mere fact of facing them is a great step in your career.
The purpose of this list
Let’s say you have decided to interview them and want to prepare for it. When you search for the term “code interview” on Google, you get a ton of resources and have no idea where to start. That was me! The nerd and bookworm wanting to eat the whole world and getting lost on it, set aside the fact that life would never be enough to review all the information. So I compiled a list of resources and divided them into three categories: books, websites, and courses. Later I arranged them in my own priority order from the most useful to the last one.
I have decided to share this list of code interview resources, with you because, a while ago I was reading an article called: “How to Lose an IT job in 10 minutes”, and I shared it in a comment and a lot of people have told me it is super useful and it even got added to the post. So here it is.
Disclaimer: I don’t have any relationship with the mentioned code interview resources: books, websites, and courses, listed below. What I mention here is just my personal research. I have read most of the books or at least checked them, but of course.
Books
- Cracking the coding interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen
- Programming Interviews Exposed by John Morgan
- Clean code by Uncle Bob Martin — this is not related to interviews themselves but it’s a must-read for any software developer and it will come in handy in all non-coding interviews in the process.
- Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena
- How to Think About Algorithms by Jeff Edmonds
- Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley — another book not exactly focused on interviews, but it will give you powerful tools for them and your life as a programmer.
- Data Structures And Algorithms Made Easy In Java by Narasimha Karumanchi
Websites with coding problems
Courses
- Coursera specialization: Data Structures and Algorithms — I 100% recommend this one.
- Interview Cake
- InterviewBit
- HiredInTech
- Coderust 2.0
That’s it for my code interview resources! The next step is in you, start studying and ace your next interview. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get it the first time, interviewing is a separate skill from programming and it takes time to learn.
Until next time!
Evana Margain Puig
