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

Scalability in a nutshell

The most predictable yet important question your interviewer will ask you is: What is scalability? Scalability is the capability and ability of a process (system, network, application) to cope with an increase in workload (by workload, we understand anything that pushes the system to the limit, such as traffic, storage capacity, a maximum number of transactions, and so on) when adding resources (typically hardware). Scalability can be expressed as the ratio between the increase in system performance and the rise in resources used. Moreover, scalability also means the ability to add extra resources without affecting/modifying the structure of the main nodes.

If adding more resources results in a slight increase in performance, or even worse, boosting the resources has no effect on performance, then you are facing so-called poor scalability.

How can you achieve scalability? During an interview that involves scalability questions, you will most probably...