Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology

Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology by Gayle Laakmann McDowell (Author), Jackie Bavaro

This book provides an introduction to the career of a product manager and the interview process typically involved. There are examples of some of the types of questions asked and proper ways to solve them. There is also a section on resumes. You want to have accomplishments written in the past tense, not activities that you were told to do. It is good to tell stories when asked. Bring up accomplishments as you are going. Talking in bullet points is also good. 

Some of the book is dated. (Yahoo! and Twitter are not at the top of anyone's lists now.) It also spends a little too long on programming questions (they have other books for that.) There is other content like case studies that also feels repetitive from their other books, but overall, this book has a better variety of content.

Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager

Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro

What is a Product Manager? The role is primarily present in technology companies. It primarily involves providing direction and managing a "product" rather than people. Product managers don't have people authority and must rely on "soft" authority to get done. They often have both a computer science and business background. This book is written with Silicon Valley in mind. There are discussions of big tech, startups and VCs. The entire career is covered, with expectations for fresh-out-of-school product managers up to those that have transitioned to CEO. Product management is most often a "mid-career" position. People will transition into it and later move to management. It involves working both outwards to understand the market and customers as well as inward to the development teams. It can be a fun for those interested. The book ends with interview advice and bios from a number of people that have worked as product managers.

Cracking the Coding Interview, 6th edition

Cracking the Coding Interview is an interview preparation book that emphasizes coding. It provides some general interview background, then dives deep into programming questions. The questions are organized by category and provide details answers. There is almost enough information there, to eliminate the need to go back to the old algorithms book.
The bulk of the book is the "question" section, with answers. They were divided into a number of different categories, with "C++", "Java" and "Hard problems" towards the end.
The questions seem to vary significantly. Some are nearly trivial, while others have multiple pages of code to answer. (This could be much more extreme than you are expected to find in an interview.) I found myself rushing through some sections as the answers just got to be too far "out there." They also seem to be somewhat dated. Map Reduce is treated as a cutting-edge solution rather than common implementation. There is also a ton of boilerplate (in Java) for many of the questions. It would be nice to explore different languages. Sometimes, the super complex java solution could be much more easily done with a different programming language.