Wednesday 29 June 2016

Top 5 Books for Programming/Coding Interviews - Best of lot

If you are preparing for Programming Job interviews and looking for some of the best books for programming questions then you have come to the right place. In this article, I am going to share a couple of good books to prepare coding, software design, and data structure algorithm questions, which are essential for any coding interviews. Though a programming interview also explores other areas of software development e.g. the programming language you would be mainly using in your project e.g. C++ or Java. The database and SQL based questions, the operating systems and UNIX related questions, some of the software design and object oriented design pattern questions and much more, but coding based questions forms the core of programming interviews.
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Monday 27 June 2016

How to convert java.sql.Date to java.util.Date in Java - JDBC Example

You often need to convert java.sql.Date to java.util.Date while interacting with databases from Java application. Since JDBC the Java API for database connectivity uses java.sql.Date to represent and most of the java code accepts java.util.Date, you have no choice but to convert SQL date to util date in Java. Though, there is some fundamental difference between them e.g. java.sql.Date only contains date part e.g. day, month, and year, it doesn't contain any time attributes, but java.util.Date contains both date and time attributes e.g. hour, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. So, when you convert a java.sql.Date to java.util.Date, the resultant java.util.Date instance has the time part as zero i.e 00:00:00 to reflect midnight.
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Saturday 25 June 2016

How to close telnet terminal in Linux and Windows (quit, exit not working)

The telnet is one of the most useful networking commands, which is used to check if a server is listening on a particular port on the remote host, but it's a little bit tricky to use, especially, if you are not using it daily. Though I have used telnet before, but when I use it after a long time, I actually forget how to close the telnet terminal and how to get out of it. I tried every possible command I can think of which is used to close, cancel a command, or exit from VIM editor in UNIX, e.g. Ctrl + C, quit, exit, q! and even the escape character '^]', only to realize that nothing is working. I finally managed to come out from telnet command prompt after a bit of struggle, and trial and error but I was surprised how difficult it can be  to use one of the top 10 networking commands in UNIX.
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Friday 24 June 2016

How to make Eclipse use spaces instead of tabs in Java editor

I use Eclipse IDE extensively to write Java programs for testing and example purpose, but when I copy those program in any text editors e.g. VIM, Notepad, TextPad or Edit plus, the indentation goes weird. I see a lot of white spaces which makes the program wider than expected. This happens because when you copy Java program from Eclipse to a text editor, tabs are converted to spaces and different editor has the different settings of tabs. UNIX text editors prefer tab is 8 spaces, Windows text editors, and IDEs  e.g. Eclipse treat tabs as 4 spaces. If you are like many Java programmer who is more comfortable with space than tabs because they give a true sense of spacing, you can always change the Java editor settings to use space instead of tabs in Eclipse. In this article, I am going to share how to make Eclipse uses spaces instead of tabs for Java editor, which you use while writing Java programs.
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Wednesday 22 June 2016

10 Examples of Joining String in Java 8 - StringJoiner and String.join()

It's quite common in day to day programming to join Strings e.g. if you have an array or List of String let's say {Sony, Apple, Google} and you want to join them by comma to produce another String "Sony, Apple, Google", there is not an easy way to do it in Java. You need to iterate through array or list and then use a StringBuilder to append a comma after each element and finally to remove the last comma because you don't want a comma after the last element. A JavaScript-like Array.join() method or join() method of Android's TextUtils class is what you need in this situation, but you won't find any of such method on String, StringBuffer, StringBuilder, Arrays, or Collections class until Java 8. Now, you have a class called StringJoiner which allows you to join multiple String by a delimiter.
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Monday 20 June 2016

Why use Log4j logging vs System.out.println in Java

Printing messages to the console is an integral part of development, testing and debugging a Java program. If you are working on a Server side application, where you can not see what's going on inside the server, your only visibility tool is a log file; without logs, you can not do any debugging or see what's going on inside your application. Though, Java has pretty handy System.out.println() methods to print something on console, which can also be routed to log file but not sufficient for a real-world Java application. If you are running a Java program in Linux or any UNIX based system, Log4j or SLF4j or any other logging framework offers a lot more features, flexibility, and improvement on message quality, which is not possible using the System.out.println() statement.
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Sunday 19 June 2016

How to install Maven on Windows 7,8 or 10?

There is no difference in installing Maven on Windows7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, you can follow the same steps to install Maven in any version Windows operating system. Installing Maven is very easy, just download the Apache Maven ZIP file from Apache Maven Project website (https://maven.apache.org/download.cgi). You can download the apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.zip for using Maven in your 64-bit Windows machine. Remember, Maven 3.3 requires JDK 1.7 or above to run, so make sure you already installed JDK 7 or JDK8. Once you download the binary distribution of Maven, half of the job is down. Now, you only need to extract the binary distribution and add the bin folder in PATH or add a couple of environment variable e.g. M2, M2_HOME into your Windows machine.
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Friday 17 June 2016

Maven Eclipse Error - "No compiler is provided in this environment. Perhaps you are running on a JRE rather than a JDK"

If you are like many Java developer who uses Maven and Eclipse to build Java project using M2Eclipse plugin, you might have seen this error before. I ran into it recently when I ran the Maven Install command for one of the Java projects, configured as Maen project,  only to realize that Maven builds failed after throwing this error. The main reason for this error is that Maven is not able to find javac (the Java compiler) which is required to compile Java source file. If you remember, the javac command comes in the bin directory of JDK, hence, you need a JDK installation in your local machine to compile Java project. You also need to have that configured in Eclipse as Installed JRE. Most likely, you have only installed and set up JRE and not JDK, at least that was the reason it throws "No compiler is provided in this environment" in my machine.
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Wednesday 15 June 2016

Top 5 Books to Learn Concurrent Programming and Multithreading in Java - Best, Must Read

Books are very important to learn something new and despite being in the electronic age, where books have lost some shine to internet and blogs, I still read and recommend them to get a complete and authoritative knowledge on any topic e.g. concurrent programming. In this article, I will share five best books to learn concurrent programming in Java. These books cover basics, starting from how to create and start a thread, parallel programming, concurrency design patterns, an advantage of concurrency and of course pitfalls, issues, and problems introduced due to multithreading. learning concurrent programming is a difficult task, not even in Java but also on other languages like C++ or modern days JVM languages like Groovy, Scala, Closure, and JRuby.
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Monday 13 June 2016

How to add Primary key into a new or existing table in SQL Server

Since a primary key is nothing but a constraint you can use ALTER clause of SQL to add a primary key into existing table. Though it's an SQL and database best practice to always have a primary key in a table, many times you will find tables which don't have a primary key. Sometimes, this is due to lack of a column which is both NOT NULL and UNIQUE (constraint require to be a primary key) but other times purely due to lack of knowledge or lack of energy. If you don't have a column which can serve as primary key you can use identity columns for that purpose. Alternatively, you can also combine multiple columns to create a composite primary keys e.g. you can combine firstname and lastname to create a primary key name etc.
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Saturday 11 June 2016

2 Books to Prepare Java EE 6 Web Component Developer Certified Expert 1Z0-899 Exam (OCEJWCD)

Oracle launched "Java EE 6 Web Component Developer Certified Expert 1Z0-899 Exam" in 2011 to replace "Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Java Server Pages and Servlet Developer Certified Expert Exam" and the "Oracle Certified Expert, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Java Server Pages and Servlet Developer" certification. They are equivalent of plain old SCWCD exam of Sun Microsystems era. Frankly speaking, I always found sun naming less confusing and clearer than Oracle's e.g. SCJP was much better than OCAJP and OCPJP. Though this exam is based on your knowledge of Servlet and JSP as per Java EE 6 specification, any book which covers this two technology e.g. "Head First Servlet and JSP" is highly recommended because Servlets and JSP are not changed much except Servlet 3.0 specification, which you can prepare separately. Oracle also provides training and preparation material and you can also take help from commercial mock exam providers like Whizlabs and Enthuware.
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Thursday 9 June 2016

How to Remove Duplicate Characters from String in Java

This week's coding exercise is to remove duplicate characters from String in Java. For example, if given String is "aaaaaa" then output should be "a", because rest of  the "a" are duplicates. Similarly, if the input is "abcd" then output should also be "abcd" because there is no duplicate character in this String.  By the way, you can not use any third-party library or Java API method to solve this problem, you need to develop your own logic or algorithm and then write code to implement that algorithm. This is one of the interesting problems from Java coding interviews and you can use this program to weed out Java programmers who cannot write code. This problem is much better than Fizzbuzz because it requires more logic and coding than solving Fizzbuzz.
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Tuesday 7 June 2016

Java Object Oriented Analysis and Design Problem - Vending Machine Part 2

This is the second part of Java tutorial to show how to create Vending Machine in Java. In the first part, we have discussed problem statement and the solution itself, but unit testing and design document was still pending, which we'll see in this article.  As I said, there are multiple ways to implement Vending machine in Java e.g. you could have easily used state design pattern to implement a vending machine, in fact, it's one of the best examples of State design pattern. Vending machine behaves differently on different states e.g. return a product if the machine is not empty, otherwise, it just returns coins, so it ideally fits in state design pattern. Though, In our solution, I have not used the state design pattern but have just coded the solution with an if else block. This is easier because of a limited number of state and not many state transition but in more real world scenario, state design pattern is better as it uses Polymorphism and removes the logic we have put inside the if-else block.
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Saturday 4 June 2016

Design a Vending Machine in Java - Interview Question

How do you design a Vending Machine in Java? is one of the good Java interview questions mostly asked at Senior level Java developer Interviews. In a typical coding interview, you will be given a problem statement to develop a vending machine and within a limited time, usually, 2 to 3 hours you need to produce design document, working code and unit test in Java. One of the key advantages of such Java interviews is that you can test many essential skills or a candidate in one go. In order to complete  the design, coding, and unit testing of  a Vending machine, a candidate needs to be really good in all three departments. By the way, this kind of real world problem is also a good exercise to improve your object-oriented analysis and design skills (see here), which is very important if you want to become a good application developer.
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Thursday 2 June 2016

10 Example of lsof commands in UNIX and Linux

It's been a long time I have written anything on UNIX or Linux, but today I'll talk about the lsof command, a utility command every system admin and developer love. The lsof command stands for list open file descriptors and as the name suggest, it is used to find open files by process. Since almost everything in UNIX are file, you can use lsof command to find an open regular file, a directory, a symbolic link, a block special file, a NFS mounted file, a socket stream, a shared library, a character special file, a regular pipe, a named pipe, an internet socket, a UNIX domain socket and many others. It's an incredibly useful tool to do debugging and troubleshooting in UNIX and Linux environment. Since most of the production system runs on the UNIX-based operating system, knowledge of this tool become even more important.
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