Cracking the Coding Interview

What is in the book

The sixth edition (2015) contains 189 programming interview questions with worked solutions, plus hints to help you get unstuck before reading the answer. The official site describes it as having 70% more content than the previous edition, including hints and more than 40 new questions. It covers:

• The process: how interviews work at large tech companies, how decisions are made and what interviewers look for, and what happens behind the scenes.
• Before the interview: getting experience, resumes, and preparing for behavioural questions.
• Five strategies for approaching algorithm questions you have not seen before.
• Technical chapters: arrays and strings, linked lists, stacks and queues, trees and graphs, bit manipulation, maths and logic puzzles, object-oriented design, recursion and dynamic programming, system design and scalability, sorting and searching, testing, and knowledge-based topics (Java, databases, threads and locks).
• The offer: handling offers and rejections, and negotiation.

Solutions are mostly written in Java.

What still holds up

The non-technical chapters. How hiring decisions are made, why a correct answer can still fail, and how to behave when stuck are drawn from real hiring experience and very little has dated. The problem-solving framework (listen, example, brute force, optimise, walk through, implement, test) is still one of the clearest ways to structure an answer.

What has aged

The edition is from 2015. Interviews today lean more on patterns such as sliding window, two pointers, prefix sums and monotonic stacks, and the typical difficulty is higher. The book's problem set is still good practice, but it is no longer enough as your only problem list. The follow-up book, Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview (2025), was written to cover those newer patterns.

Reviews

On Goodreads the sixth edition holds an average of about 4.3 out of 5 (September 2026). Reviewers consistently praise the explanations and the process chapters. Common criticisms are that some questions feel dated, the Java-only solutions are awkward for Python users, and the book encourages a memorisation-heavy style of preparation if used as the only resource.

How to use it today

• Read the process chapters first (the opening chapters and the behavioural section). They are the most valuable part.
• Use the problems as supplementary practice, alongside a modern list such as NeetCode 150 or Grind 75 on LeetCode.
• Use the hints. Try a problem, read one hint, try again. It trains the unstuck-yourself skill interviews need.
• Translate solutions into your interview language rather than copying the Java.

Common questions

Should I buy this or Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview? If you buy one book today, Beyond CtCI is more current. This one is still worth reading for the process chapters if you can borrow it.

Is the system design chapter enough? No. It is a short introduction; use a dedicated system design resource for senior loops.

Best for: first-time candidates who want to understand the process, not just the questions.