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

Key hints to look for in an interview

During an interview, time and stress are serious factors that can affect concentration. Having the capacity to identify templates, recognize certain cases, guess the correct answer, and so on gives you a major advantage. As we stated in Chapter 5, How to Approach a Coding Challenge, in figure 5.2, building an example (or a use case) is the second step to tackling a coding challenge. Even if the code is given by the interviewer, building an example is still quite useful for determining Big O.

As you probably noticed, in almost every non-trivial example that we covered, we preferred to visualize the runtime for one or several concrete cases. That way, you can really understand the details of the code, identify the inputs, determine the static (constant) and dynamic (variable) parts of the code, and get a general view of how the code works.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of key hints that can help you in an interview:

  • If the...