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

Coding challenges

Next, we will tackle several coding challenges regarding object-oriented programming. For each problem, we will follow Figure 5.2 from Chapter 5, How to Approach a Coding Challenge. Mainly, we will start by asking the interviewer a question such as What are the design constraints? Commonly, coding challenges that orbit OOD are expressed by the interviewer in a general way. This is done intentionally to make you ask details about design constraints.

Once we have a clear picture of the constraints, we can try an example (which can be a sketch, a step-by-step runtime visualization, a bullet list, and suchlike). Then, we figure out the algorithm(s)/solution(s), and finally, we provide the design skeleton.

Example 1: Jukebox

Amazon, Google

Problem: Design the main classes of the jukebox musical machine.

What to ask: What is the jukebox playing – CDs, MP3s? What should I design – the jukebox building process, how it works, or something else...