BCtCI Free Resources

Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview comes with quite a lot of accompanying free resources. Here's a comprehensive list of everything available online (I created it because I was starting to lose track myself!).

Book content

• Free chapters from the book: bctci.co/free-chapters. Get a sense of the book's content with 9 free chapters: The first 7 chapters, covering topics such as why technical interviews are broken, what recruiters won't tell you, and how to get in the door at companies without a referral, and 2 technical chapters: Binary search and Sliding Windows.
• Online-only chapters: These are Tier 3 topics that are available for free online.
  • bctci.co/union-find
  • bctci.co/monotonic-stacks-and-queues
  • bctci.co/set-and-map-implementations
  • More to come in the future!
• Online platform: bctci.co. The main site for the book, with:
  • All the book problems with solutions in Python, C++, Java, and JavaScript. (Pro tip: You can go from a book problem to the online content by creating a URL with the problem name. E.g., "String Matching" -> bctci.co/string-matching)
  • Our AI Interviewer, where you can practice all the book's problems: bctci.co/ai
  • Dozens of mock interview replays (be a fly on the wall and learn from others!)
  • And more!

Extra content

• My posts: nilmamano.com/blog/category/bctci. All my blog posts about BCtCI, including:
  • Problem Solving BCtCI Style: Walkthrough of the problem-solving approach in the book.
  • Get Binary Search Right Every Time, Explained Without Code: Explaining how we approach binary search in the book.
• Aline's posts: Interviewing.io/blog. A lot of the end-to-end job search advice in the book is inspired by, or was the inspiration for, Aline's posts in the IIO blog (the insights in the book about the job market are backed by IIO data). My favorites:
  • Stop Trying to Make Recruiters Think, or Why Your Resume Is Bad and How to Fix It
  • It's OK to Postpone Your Interviews If You're Not Ready

Practice tools

In the "How To Practice" chapter, we talk about how to make the most of your practice. Our advice includes using the following tools:

• Postmortem Log Template (Google Sheets): After doing a practice interview, we recommend filling in a postmortem log to reflect on what you could have done differently and identify things to work on. Here is an example:

• Python-Based Interview Cheat Sheet Example (Google Docs): We recommend maintaining a personalized cheat sheet where you write down things like:

  • Useful recipes and tricks
  • Things you tend to forget
  • Your favorite implementation of classic algorithms
  • Language-specific quirks
  • etc.

The key is to make it your own (you learn by curating it), but you can use our example for reference (it's Python-focused, but yours doesn't have to be). Maintaining this cheat sheet goes a long way in preventing getting rusty!

• Bug List Example (Google Docs): We also recommend maintaining a list of bugs you make often. Tracking them like this helps you break out of bad habits.

Reference diagrams

• bctci.co/topics-image: The Catalog of DS&A Topics. The book covers all the Tier 1 and 2 topics, while some Tier 3 topics are available for free online (see above).

• bctci.co/interview-checklist-image: Interview checklist. This is from the "Anatomy of a Coding Interview" chapter, where we break down our best advice for each step of the interview. (Some of the terms won't make sense if you don't have the book, but we recommend making your own checklist and following it during practice so you don't get sidetracked or forget something important on the day of the interview.)

• bctci.co/boosters-image: The list of general problem-solving techniques we cover in the "Problem-Solving Boosters" chapter.

• bctci.co/question-landscape (pg 168): This chart shows how we think about root memorization vs problem-solving skills. In the book, we try to emphasize the latter a lot more than the former!

• Big O Table (pg 236): Quick reference for how to establish TLE (Time Limit Exceeded) upper bounds. See the Boundary Thinking chapter for more details and other types of bounds.

Podcasts

Mike has gone on a few podcasts to talk about the book.

• Tech and Test: Cracking Big Tech Interviews with Mike Mroczka (YouTube)
• Inspiring Tech Leaders: Mastering Software Engineering Interviews - Expert Interview Preparation with Mike Mroczka, Author of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview
• Hardcore Soft Skills podcast: How to Master a Coding Interview: Mike Mroczka

Ways to contact us

• bctci.co/discord: The BCtCI Discord server, where we regularly answer questions.
• bctci.co/errata: The list of known bugs. We periodically send newer revisions to Amazon as bugs get reported, so the errata lets you filter by your revision date and shows you only the bugs in your revision.

Found a broken link or have suggestions for additional resources? We'd love to hear it! Tell us via one of the methods above.