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I've considered learning Java in order to seek employment as a programmer. I have been programming in C and other languages for years, though I have (almost) no professional experience that I can put on a resume. [As a sysadmin, most of my programming tasks have been relatively small and very secondary to what I was doing.] However at the time I was looking, there were a lot of Java job postings that seemed as though you had a fair shot of getting hired if you could talk sensibly about writing code in Java... So, I find this topic interesting. But I have a couple of questions about your questions: On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 12:37:29PM -0400, Duane Morin wrote: > * Can you tell me what constitutes a well-formed XML file? (Since I got > so much arugment over the 'triviality' of this question I changed it to > drawing a bad XML file on paper and asking people to tell me why it is a > bad XML file) Isn't XML seperate and distinct from Java? What's one got to do with the other? Presumably the applications you're working with make a lot of use of XML? If so, would you consider hiring someone with no experience working with XML? > * Given a primitive such as an int or long, write some real code to count > the number of bits that are set. This is one of my favorite questions, > because there are a variety of creative ways to go about it just from a > problem solving perspective, and you can also talk about different ways to > optimize it (for size/speed). Sure, the problem as described is trivial, I agree that this problem is trival, but I find it a bit curious. The obvious (to me) way to do this is to use a bit mask, setting each of the bits in succession, to test which bits are set, counting as you go. But this strikes me as mainly an academic problem... While I've written many segments of code to test various bits, I've never actually come across a need to count those that are set. Is there a practical use for this problem? I'm also curious about what some of the other suggested solutions were... > * I have a list of several million strings, but I know that there are only > about 100k unique ones. I want to make myself a frequency table that > tells me how often each string occurred. Write me a data structure to do > it. Everybody makes a hashmap, which is fine, but most people end up > creating several million Integer objects when it can be done by only > creating 100k. Not knowing Java, I couldn't write the code to do it; but the obvious solution seems to be to create a hash with the string as a key, and the frequency would be the value. I'm having trouble imagining an approach which would produce 1M hash objects and provide a correct answer... What's the deal? > * Crawl all the HREFs out of a given HTML file. Here I would definitely apply the Google defense... ;-) > * How would you implement an LRU cache? By looking it up in Tannenbaum? ;-) Or google... This, like some of the others, strikes me as a bit of a specialized application to ask in an interview. I'm not a professional programmer, but it strikes me that those who write caching code often do so, and hence will be able to answer this question easily; those who don't won't. It strikes me that one could potentially work as a programmer for years and years without ever having an occasion to implement a caching algorithm... I'm not trying to pick on you or start a flame war, but I'm curious about your reasoning for asking this particular question. LRU caches seem particularly of interest to people writing database code or operating system code, and not much else. [I would argue that the cache for a web browser is a kind of database, even if the web browser is very different from a DBMS package.] -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20040430/90862e86/attachment.sig>
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