By admin | October 31, 2007
comp.lang.python group recently had a discussion on which interview questions to ask a candidate, with Tim Chase suggesting the following list (redacted from original to include just Python-related material). As you can see, some generic programming questions and some process questions made the list:
- Do they know a tuple/list/dict when they see it?
- When to use list vs. tuple vs. dictionary vs. set?
- Can they use list comprehensions (and know when not to abuse them?)
- Can they use tuple unpacking for assignment?
- String building. Do they use “+=” or do they build a list and use .join() to recombine them efficiently?
- Truth-value testing questions and observations (do they write “if x == True” or do they just write “if x”)?
- Basic file-processing (iterating over a file’s lines)
- Basic understanding of exception handling
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By admin | August 23, 2007
Dr. Dobb’s Journal in its Linux and open source section is running an article by Emmett Dulaney with 50 Perl questions and answers. The focus is mainly on the knowledge of the language itself with questions like:
- What is the simplest type of data that Perl can work with?
- Which operator can be used to take the bottom item from an array?
- You want to close the directory handle EVAN. Which of the following should you use to accomplish this?
- You want your script to read in a value from the keyboard for a variable named $duo. What do you set $duo equal to in the program to have it read a keyboard value? __________ (Fill in the blank.)
- Your script has just read in a variable from the keyboard and you want to strip that variable of the newline character that came in. What operator should you use to perform this operation?
Answers are available on Dr. Dobb’s Journal site.
Sean Hull wrote a few interview questions for Database Journal dealing mostly with Oracle:
- Why is a UNION ALL faster than a UNION?
- What are some advantages to using Oracle’s CREATE DATABASE statement to create a new database manually?
- What are three rules of thumb to create good passwords? How would a DBA enforce those rules in Oracle? What business challenges might you encounter?
- Describe the Oracle Wait Interface, how it works, and what it provides. What are some limitations? What do the db_file_sequential_read and db_file_scattered_read events indicate?
- How do you return the top-N results of a query in Oracle? Why doesn’t the obvious method work?
- Can Oracle’s Data Guard be used on Standard Edition, and if so how? How can you test that the standby database is in sync?
- What is a database link? What is the difference between a public and a private database link? What is a fixed user database link?
The database interview answers are all listed on Database Journal Web site.
