April 2007
Beginner
257 pages
7h 18m
English
book
Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, Second Edition
by John Mongan, Noah Suojanen, Eric Giguère
Content preview from Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, Second Edition
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6.4. Summary
Programmers use strings and arrays all the time, so it's not surprising to see problems about them showing up in a programming interview. A string can even be thought of as an array of characters — and if not actually implemented that way, there's usually an easy way to convert it to an array and back.
Arrays are not treated identically in all languages. All languages support static arrays, but few offer native support for dynamic arrays. C++ and C don't do any bounds checking of array access, whereas Java and C# do.
String manipulation is so fundamental that it's normally handled via built-in library routines or system classes. Languages like C# and Java consider strings to be immutable, making changes to a string nontrivial and requiring the use of special mutable string classes. If you're not careful, string manipulation can greatly degrade the performance of your algorithms.
You should know how to convert a string to an array of characters and back for each language you're using, because your answers to many interview problems will require such conversions.
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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