Chapter 1 Hiring Programmers: The Inside Story

• Reasons They Recruit
  • Planned expansion
    • The interviewer’s motivation and approach
    • Your approach
  • Specifi c projects
    • The interviewer’s motivation and approach
    • Your approach
  • Replacing someone
    • The interviewer’s motivation and approach
    • Your approach
• Talking to Managers
  • Tech talk—don’t hold back
  • Using metaphors
• Preparing Your CV
  • Include relevant keywords but keep them in context
  • Write as well as you can
  • Justify your claims of experience
  • Ignore anyone who tells you “strictly one or two pages”
  • Emphasize skills that match the job advertisement
  • Don’t leave unexplained gaps between jobs
  • “Reading, music, and cinema”
  • Use a logical layout
  • Graduate CVs
  • CVs containing more experience
  • CVs of those returning to work
  • Avoiding common CV blunders
  • Poor spelling or grammar
  • Vague or nonspecific accomplishments
  • Unclear or cluttered layout
  • Unprofessional e-mail address
• Using Job Sites
  • Comparison of major job boards
• Recruitment Agencies
  • Working effectively with a recruiter
• Searching for Jobs Yourself
  • Networking for introverts
  • Finding potential employers
  • Approaching potential employers
  • Being persistent
  • Timing
• Emerging Alternatives
  • Using Twitter
  • Using Facebook
  • Using LinkedIn
  • Writing a Blog
  • Careers at Stack Overfl ow
  • Skills matter: “Find Your Ninja”

Chapter 2 Handling the Phone Interview with Confidence

• Knowing What to Expect
  • Preparing your cheat sheets
  • Relating your experience
  • Answering hard questions
  • Asking good questions
  • Having a phone interview checklist
  • Using a phone interview cheat sheet template

Chapter 3 In-Person Interviews

• Preparing for the Interview
  • Knowing what to expect
  • Doing your homework
  • Dressing appropriately
  • Handling different types of interview questions
    • Fielding social and behavioral questions
    • Handling design problems
    • Tackling technical pop-quiz questions
    • Fielding the general intelligence test
    • Dealing with the stress test question
• The Most Important Thing
  • Establishing rapport
  • It takes work
    • Be a good listener
    • Ask good questions
    • Mirror your interviewer
    • Look for ways to interact
• The Second Most Important Thing
  • Speaking up
  • Being aware of how much time you have
  • Stories are good, evidence is better
• Communicating Effectively
  • Using your passion to combat nerves
  • Using your hands
  • Speaking slower than usual
  • Starting and fi nishing clearly
  • Repeating your main point
  • Spontaneity improves with practice

Chapter 4 Negotiating a Job Offer

• Understanding the Market
• Doing the Numbers
  • Considering the whole package
  • Must have, should have, could have
    • Must have
    • Should have
    • Could have
    • Won’t have
• The Role of the Recruiting Agent
• Start as You Mean to Go On
  • Avoid overcommitting
  • Realism and idealism
• Evaluating a Contract
  • Intellectual Property (IP)
  • Non-compete clauses
  • Non-solicitation clauses
• What to Do If Things Go Wrong
  • “It’s a standard contract”
  • The silent treatment
  • Escalation and ultimatums
• Summary of Negotiating Tips

Chapter 5 Programming Fundamentals

• Understanding Binary, Octal, Hexadecimal
  • Converting hexadecimal to binary
  • Using unicode
• Understanding Data Structures
  • Using arrays
  • Using hash tables
  • Using queues and stacks
  • Using trees
  • Using graphs
  • Understanding graph traversal
• Sorting
• Working with Recursion
• Modeling with Object-Oriented Programming
  • Understanding classes and objects
  • Untangling inheritance and composition
  • Exploring polymorphism
  • Data-hiding with encapsulation
• Thinking Like a Functional Programmer
• Understanding SQL
  • What is ACID?
  • Set-based thinking
• Full-Stack Web Development
• Decipering Regular Expressions
  • Finding content with anchors and word boundaries
  • Matching character classes
  • Constraining matches with quantifi ers
  • Working with groups and captures
  • Avoiding gotchas
  • More reading
• Recognizing Hard Problems
• Questions
• Answers

Chapter 6 Code Quality

• Writing Clear Code
• Writing Expressive Code
• Measuring Effi ciency and Performance
  • Big-O notation
    • Constant, O(1)
    • Logarithmic, O( log n )
    • Linear, O(n)
    • Quadratic, O(n2)
    • Using big-O
  • Measure performance
  • Consider context
  • Have a goal
  • Measure more than once, take an average
  • Divide and conquer
  • Try the easy things fi rst
  • Use a profi ler
• Understanding What “Modular” Means
• Understanding the SOLID principles
  • Single Responsibility Principle
  • Open/Closed Principle
  • Liskov Substitution Principle
  • Interface Segregation Principle
  • Dependency Inversion Principle
• Avoiding Code Duplication
• Questions
• Answers

Chapter 7 The Usual Suspects

• Concurrent Programming
  • Race conditions
  • Locks
  • Deadlocks
  • Livelocks
• Relational Databases
  • Database design
  • Normalization
    • First normal form: “No repeated values”
    • Second normal form: “No partial dependencies”
    • Third normal form: “No transitive dependencies”
    • Boyce-Codd normal form
    • Beyond BCNF
  • Denormalization
  • Populating a normalized database
• Pointers
  • Functions in C receive arguments by value
  • Arrays in C are handled like pointers
  • Passing values and references
• Design Issues
  • YAGNI is not an excuse to take shortcuts
  • Design for performance
  • Do not trade common sense for a methodology
• Bad Habits
  • Mishandling exceptions
  • Not being paranoid enough
  • Being superstitious
  • Working against the team
  • Copying and pasting too much
  • Eager loading
• Questions
• Answers

Chapter 8 Quirks and Idioms

• Binary Fractions and Floating Point Numbers
• Questions
• JavaScript
• Questions
• C#
• Questions
• Java
• Questions
• Perl
• Questions
• Ruby
• Questions
• Transact-SQL
• Questions
• Answers

Chapter 9 Testing — Not Just for Testers

• Unit Tests
• Test-Driven Development
  • Behavior-driven development
  • Red, green, refactor
• Writing Good Unit Tests
  • Run quickly
  • Be simple
  • Be self-evident
  • Be helpful when failing
  • Be self-contained
• Testing Slow Things
• Unit Testing Frameworks
• Mock Objects
• Questions
• Answers

Chapter 10 The Right Tools

• Exploring Visual Studio
• Questions
• Exploiting Command-Line Tools
• Questions
• Understanding PowerShell
• Questions
• Troubleshooting with Utilities from Sysinternals
• Questions
• Managing Source Code
  • Source control with Team Foundation Server
• Questions
  • Source control with Subversion
• Questions
  • Source control with git
• Questions
• Answers

Chapter 11 Notorious Interview Questions

• Estimating on the Spot
• Questions
• Solving Puzzles and Brain-Teasers
• Questions
• Solving Probability Problems
• Questions
• Coping with Concurrency
• Questions
• Doing Tricks with Bits
• Questions
• Devising Recursive Algorithms
• Questions
• Understanding Logic Gates
• Questions
• Writing Code to…Prove You Can Code
• Questions
• Answers

Chapter 12 Programming Wisdom

• Questions
• Answers

Appendix Preparing Your Cheat Sheets

• General and Behavioral
• Programming, General
• Programming Concepts
• Work History
• Questions to Ask, If Given the Opportunity

Index