The Complete Coding Interview Guide in Java
An effective guide for aspiring Java developers to ace their programming interviews
Anghel Leonard
- 788 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
The Complete Coding Interview Guide in Java
An effective guide for aspiring Java developers to ace their programming interviews
Anghel Leonard
About This Book
Explore a wide variety of popular interview questions and learn various techniques for breaking down tricky bits of code and algorithms into manageable chunks
Key Features
- Discover over 200 coding interview problems and their solutions to help you secure a job as a Java developer
- Work on overcoming coding challenges faced in a wide array of topics such as time complexity, OOP, and recursion
- Get to grips with the nuances of writing good code with the help of step-by-step coding solutions
Book Description
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.
What you will learn
- Solve the most popular Java coding problems efficiently
- Tackle challenging algorithms that will help you develop robust and fast logic
- Practice answering commonly asked non-technical interview questions that can make the difference between a pass and a fail
- Get an overall picture of prospective employers' expectations from a Java developer
- Solve various concurrent programming, functional programming, and unit testing problems
Who this book is for
This book is for students, programmers, and employees who want to be invited to and pass interviews given by top companies. The book assumes high school mathematics and basic programming knowledge.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Section 1: The Non-Technical Part of an Interview
- Chapter 1, Where to Start and How to Prepare for the Interview
- Chapter 2, What Interviews at Big Companies Look Like
- Chapter 3, Common Non-Technical Questions and How To Answer Them
- Chapter 4, How to Handle Failures
- Chapter 5, How to Approach a Coding Challenge
Chapter 1: Where to Start and How to Prepare for the Interview
- Start your interview preparation as early as possible
- Get the right experience
- Show your work to the world
- Prepare your resume
- Take the interview
The novice interview roadmap
Know yourself
- Are you interested in developing user interfaces or the heavy business logic that is executed behind the scenes? Developing great user interfaces is an extremely important aspect of a graphical interface. After all, the graphical interface is what the end user sees and interacts with. It requires creativity, innovation, vision, and psychology (for example, developing multi-device interfaces is quite challenging). It requires knowledge of Java AWT, Swing, JavaFX, Vaadin, and so on. On the other hand, the business logic that is executed behind the scenes and answers to end user actions is the engine behind the interface, but, for the end user, most of the time it is a black box. The business logic requires strong coding skills and solid knowledge of algorithms, data structures, frameworks (such as Spring Boot, Jakarta EE, and Hibernate), databases, and so on. Most Java developers opt for coding the business logic behind the scenes (for desktop and web applications).
- What kind of applications do you find most engaging (desktop, mobile, web, or others)? Each type of application has specific challenges and dedicated suites of tools. Today, companies target as many consumers as possible, therefore, modern applications should be available for multi-platform devices. Most of all, you should be able to code in the knowledge that the application will be exposed on different devices and will interact with other systems.
- Are you especially interested in testing, debugging, and/or code review? Having strong skills in writing valuable tests, finding bugs, and reviewing the code are the most important skills for guaranteeing a high-quality final product. Of these three areas, we should focus on testing, as almost any Java developer job description requires the candidate to have strong skills in writing unit tests and integration tests (the most commonly preferred tools are JUnit, TestNG, Mockito, and Cucumber-JVM). Nevertheless, trying to find a dedicated Java tester job or Java code reviewer is quite challenging and is usually encountered in big companies (especially in companies that provide remote jobs, such as Upstack or Crossover). Most companies prefer pair code review and each Java developer should write meaningful tests that provide high coverage for the code that they wrote. So you have to be able do both: write astonishing code, and write the tests for that code.
- Are you interested in applications that interact with databases or do you try to avoid such applications? Most Java applications use a database (a relational database or a NoSQL database). A wide range of Java developer jobs will imperatively require you to have strong knowledge of coding against a database via Object Relational Mapping frameworks (such as Hibernate), JPA implementations (such as Hibernate JPA or Eclipse Link), or SQL-centric libraries (such as jOOQ). Most Java applications interact with a relational database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQL Server. But NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Redis, or Cassandra are also encountered in a significant number of applications. Trying to avoid developing applications that interact with a database may seriously limit the range of jobs on offer. If this is your case, then you should reconsider this aspect starting today.
- Do you have a predilection for code optimization and performance? Caring about the performance of your code is a highly appreciated skill. Such actions will catalog you as a perfectionist with great attention to detail. Having solutions that optimize the code and increase its performances will place you pretty quickly in the position of getting involved in designing and archi...