Book Image

The Complete Coding Interview Guide in Java

By : Anghel Leonard
Book Image

The Complete Coding Interview Guide in Java

By: Anghel Leonard

Overview of this book

Java is one of the most sought-after programming languages in the job market, but cracking the coding interview in this challenging economy might not be easy. This comprehensive guide will help you to tackle various challenges faced in a coding job interview and avoid common interview mistakes, and will ultimately guide you toward landing your job as a Java developer. This book contains two crucial elements of coding interviews - a brief section that will take you through non-technical interview questions, while the more comprehensive part covers over 200 coding interview problems along with their hands-on solutions. This book will help you to develop skills in data structures and algorithms, which technical interviewers look for in a candidate, by solving various problems based on these topics covering a wide range of concepts such as arrays, strings, maps, linked lists, sorting, and searching. You'll find out how to approach a coding interview problem in a structured way that produces faster results. Toward the final chapters, you'll learn to solve tricky questions about concurrency, functional programming, and system scalability. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to solve Java coding problems commonly used in interviews, and will have developed the confidence to secure your Java-centric dream job.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Non-Technical Part of an Interview
7
Section 2: Concepts
12
Section 3: Algorithms and Data Structures
19
Section 4: Bonus – Concurrency and Functional Programming

Trees in a nutshell

A tree is a non-linear data structure that organizes data hierarchically in nodes and cannot contain cycles. A tree has a specific terminology that may vary slightly, but commonly, the following notions are adopted:

  • Root is the topmost node.
  • Edge is the link or connection between two nodes.
  • Parent is a node that has an edge to a child node.
  • Child is a node that has a parent node.
  • Leaf is a node that does not have a child node.
  • Height is the length of the longest path to a leaf.
  • Depth is the length of the path to its root.

The following diagram exemplifies these terms when used on a tree:

Figure 13.1 – Tree terminology

Typically, any tree can have a root. The nodes of the tree can respect a certain order (or not), can store any type of data, and may have links to their parents.

Tree coding challenges are rife with ambiguous details and/or incorrect assumptions. It is very important to clarify...