TL;DR: There is no official PDF, ebook, or print edition of Grokking the Coding Interview. It has always been an interactive online course, and I'll explain below why we keep it that way on purpose. The PDFs floating around on random sites and GitHub are unofficial snapshots of much older versions: missing patterns, missing problems, no working code. What is free: the course's introductory lessons, the complete Grokking 75 problem list, and every guide on this blog, including the full 42-pattern field guide. If you specifically want something on paper, I list the honest alternatives at the end.
I created Grokking the Coding Interview, so I can answer this one definitively rather than diplomatically. People search for a PDF or book version of the course every day, usually for one of three reasons: they want it cheaper, they want it offline, or they just assume anything this well-known must exist as a book. Let's take the whole question apart.
The short answer
No official PDF. No Kindle edition. No print book. The course lives at designgurus.io, in the browser, and that is the only place the real, current version exists. (If you've seen the name on more than one website and wondered which is which, that's a separate story: see Which Grokking the Coding Interview Is the Official One?)
Why there's no PDF, on purpose
This isn't stinginess; a PDF would genuinely be a worse product, for three reasons.
1. The course is built around running code, not reading it. There are 751 in-browser playgrounds across the course. When a lesson shows the sliding window template, you run it, break it, and fix it right there. Solutions exist in six languages (Python, Java, C++, JavaScript, Go, C#), and you pick yours once and read the whole course in it. Paper can't do any of that; a PDF of an interactive course is a screenshot of a gym.
2. It updates continuously. The course has grown to 42 patterns (32 common + 10 advanced) and 300+ problems, and interview fashion keeps moving; patterns like monotonic stack barely appeared in interviews years ago and are now routine. A printed edition starts aging the day it ships. This is exactly the problem with the classic interview books, which I examined honestly in Is Cracking the Coding Interview Still Worth It?
3. Interview prep is practice, not reading. The failure mode of book-based prep is finishing the book with a feeling of understanding and no ability to perform. The course is structured to force problem-solving between lessons. A format that made passive reading easier would quietly make the outcome worse.
About those PDFs you found on Google and GitHub
Search long enough and you'll find "Grokking the Coding Interview PDF" downloads and GitHub repositories with pattern notes. Two things you should know before spending time on them, and neither is a legal lecture:
They're old. The unofficial copies circulating are snapshots of much earlier versions of the course, from when it covered a fraction of the current pattern list and problem set. You'd be preparing from the interview landscape of several years ago, missing the patterns that modern loops actually test. That's a bad trade even at a price of zero.
They're the least useful part of the product. What makes the course work is the sequencing, the playgrounds, and the escalating variations per pattern. A text dump keeps none of it. The GitHub repos with "grokking" in the name are unofficial notes by third parties; some are decent as revision checklists, none is the course.
If your budget is genuinely zero, don't use a stale bootleg; use the real free material below, which is current and written by us.
What's actually free
- The course's introductory lessons are free at designgurus.io: you can judge the teaching style and work through the opening material without paying or entering a card.
- The complete Grokking 75 list, free in this blog post, with its 6-week schedule. That's a full prep plan for a short timeline, no purchase required.
- The 42-pattern field guide, free: LeetCode Patterns: The Complete Guide, with the tell for every pattern and a cheat sheet.
- Free deep dives with full templates: sliding window, two pointers, dynamic programming, Python templates for every major pattern, and more via the start-here library.
Honestly, the free layer above is more current than any bootleg PDF in circulation.
If you specifically want a physical book
Fair preference; some people retain more from paper. The honest options:
- Cracking the Coding Interview remains the best-known print option. Parts of it have aged well and parts haven't; my full audit is here.
- Grokking Algorithms (the illustrated Manning book by Aditya Bhargava) is a genuinely lovely beginner's introduction to algorithms. Note that despite the similar name, it's unrelated to our course: it teaches algorithm fundamentals gently, it doesn't prepare you for interview pattern recognition.
- Print the free guides. The pattern field guide and the deep dives on this blog print perfectly well, and unlike a bootleg PDF, they're current.
A reasonable hybrid many of our students use: a book (or the free blog) for first exposure on the couch, the course for the actual practice loop at the desk.
What the real course costs
Since price is usually what sends people hunting for PDFs: the course is a one-time $79 (discounted from the $197 list price), with lifetime access, all 42 patterns, 300+ problems in six languages, and every future update included. That's less than most print textbooks, and it's rated 4.6/5 by roughly 63,000 learners.
Try before deciding: the free introductory lessons are open to everyone. If the teaching style clicks, the full course is a one-time $79 with lifetime access. If your timeline is short, Grokking 75 is the focused 6-week track.
FAQs
Is there an official Grokking the Coding Interview book or PDF? No. The course is interactive-only, by design: 751 runnable playgrounds, six languages, and continuous updates don't survive the conversion to paper or PDF. Any PDF you find is an unofficial, outdated copy.
Is Grokking the Coding Interview free anywhere? The introductory lessons are free at designgurus.io, and a large amount of companion material is free on this blog: the complete Grokking 75 list, the 42-pattern field guide, and the pattern deep dives. The full course is a one-time $79.
Is the GitHub version real? The repositories with "grokking" in the name are third-party notes and snapshots of old versions. Some work as revision checklists; none contains the current patterns, problems, or playgrounds. If you want free and current, use the blog guides instead.
Can I read the course offline or on my phone? The course is web-based and reads fine in a phone browser; the playgrounds run there too. There's no offline download, which is the honest tradeoff of a product that updates continuously.
Does the Educative version come as a PDF? No; Educative's similarly named courses are also web-based subscriptions. And note they're separate products from the original course, which is a common point of confusion we untangle in Which Grokking the Coding Interview Is the Official One?