reviews.html

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title: Amazon Reviews
description:
    Amazon reviews summarized
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<h2 id="about">Reviews <i class="icon-double-angle-right"></i></h2>


We have 60 reviews on Amazon, and the vast majority are very postive. Indeed,
we have the single highest average rating in our category!
<p>

<h1>The good</h1>
Here are some examples of things that our readers like about our book:

<img src="{{ site.data.members.url }}img/rev-good-1.png"></img>
<img src="{{ site.data.members.url }}img/rev-good-2.png"></img>
<img src="{{ site.data.members.url }}img/rev-good-3.png"></img>
<img src="{{ site.data.members.url }}img/rev-good-4.png"></img>

<h1>The bad</h1>

We have a handful of negative reviews, mostly from earlier versions. The most common complaints were
the level of difficulty,  the use of specialized C++ constructs, and the use of C++ over Java.
<p>

We've addressed all of these. 

We added roughly 60 new problems and 40 new variants
Many of these are basic programming exercises ("reverse the sublist consisting of nodes L to U in a singly linked list"), but require careful coding to deal with corner-cases.
<p>

We retired the same number of problems.
Most of the retired problems were more appropriate for quant interviews, i.e., very math oriented. We found that almost all of our readers are focused on software developer positions, and many were frustrated by the math problems.
<p>

Some other changes: 
We reworded text in many places to it read easier.
We added more details to a number of solutions. (For example, we start many solutions with brute-force solutions that we then refine into an optimum solution.)
We give better algorithms for several of the original problems.
Finally, we fixed many small typos and bugs. 

<h1>The ugly</h1>

One negative of the Amazon review process is that its openess makes it susceptible to abuse. Here's an extreme example - it's clearly
inappropriate with its references to drugs and adultery, but desptite repeated attempts, we were unable to 
get Amazon to take it down.
<p>

<img src="{{ site.data.members.url }}img/rev-ugly.png">