Elements of Programming Interviews in Python: The Insiders' Guide

After finishing my internship at Facebook as a data engineer last summer, I am looking for a book that can help me to prepare for technical interviews involving Python because I want to find a full-time position as a data engineer or data scientist.Starting last year, I started looking for books and websites from which I could study data structures and algorithms in Python. Unfortunately, the majority of solutions in popular interview preparation books and websites nowadays are written in C++ or Java, such as Cracking the Coding Interview, Leetcode, and GeeksforGeeks.At the beginning of this year, I finally discovered this book Elements of Programming Interviews in Python. It is best interview preparation book I have encountered so far, for the following reasons:1. It is written in Python 3.6, which is easier to understand for people who don’t have a computer science (CS) background.2. It provides tips, popular libraries, and boot camp questions for each data structure and algorithm concept, which can be useful and provide a quick study guide right before your interview.3. It has an entire section on domain-specific programs (design problems, language questions, object-oriented design, and common tools) to boost your fundamental knowledge in CS.4. It also has a table that simulates different preparation scenarios (a 3-day hackathon, a 1-week finals cram, a 1-month term project, and a 4-monts algorithms class), and it recommends a subset of problems from different topics for each scenario, so you can plan your preparation accordingly.5. It provides a detailed analysis for each problem, starting from brute force, to analyzing space and time complexities, to the final optimal solution, so you can practice your thinking process and use it during the real interview.6. It has an online judge that is similar to Leetcode but with solutions written in Python, so you can practice and refer to the solutions in real-time!To summarize, if you are like me and don’t have a background in CS, are short of time, and want to get a structured approach and practice your Python programing interview skills online, this is the book you should start with!Good luck!

This is by far the best resource out there for someone who's interviewing in Python. There's a large variety of interesting questions, and the book includes challenging variants on many of those questions. These variants require even more creative algorithmic thinking.One of the biggest advantages of this book is that it's specifically geared towards Python. The Python solutions in this book are clean and well-thought out, and they habitualize good Python practices. It's much more effective than picking up an interview preparation book that's written in another programming language, and trying to port all the code over yourself.The authors also give some serious consideration to space complexity, and there are some really clever solutions in the book that aren't just time-efficient, but space-efficient as well.The second part of this book is the Honors Class section, which provides harder problems to solve once you're comfortable with the preceding material. It's roughly 60 pages of significantly harder questions/solutions that are meant to solidify your problem solving skills.I think the biggest strength of this book is the EPI Judge. It's a Git repository that you can clone, and gives you a playground to test out your own solutions to the problems listed in the book. It will then run your code against a correct solution across many test cases, and let you know if your code passes validation.I can't understate how useful that is. Especially for problems involving graphs and trees, setting up your own data structures and test cases can be an incredibly time-consuming process. If you go through this book and solve the problems with EPI Judge, you will be a much stronger interviewing candidate.UPDATE: Received 4 job offers from 6 on-sites, started at Google in October 2018.

I found this book helpful in brushing up on my knowledge of data structures and algorithms. It also contains useful interview tips for both interviewers and interviewees. It even has some short discussions on variety of other programming-related topics (parallel programming, design patterns, etc.).The book is organized by topic, with each topic having a set of problems and solutions with clear explanations by the authors.How does it compare to Leetcode? Well, for one, you can carry this book with you to the beach, which is harder to do with Leetcode. Another thing is that the authors have great career track records. I found their explanations to be of a higher quality than most of the explanations in the "Discuss" section on Leetcode. That said, there is more content on Leetcode (for free) than there is in this book. But quality > quantity, and I think this book was certainly worth the price for me due to its quality and accessibility.

What I like in this book:- Nice introduction to Python libraries you need to know for each section.- Good set of problemsWhat I dislike:- Coding solutions use a lot of Syntax Sugar and 'Pythonic' short syntax that makes it less understandable. I think as the goal here is to understand the code and algorithms and not necessarily write the most concise and shortest code, it is better to keep it more simple and understandable.- Print and paper quality is not great.What I like to see:a link to the leetcode problem or a similar environment that can write the solutions in code and evaluate it by running test cases.