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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Java Mistake 3 - Using "==" instead of equals() to compare Objects in Java

In this part of Java programming mistakes, we will take a look at another common pattern, where programmers tend to use "==" operator to compare Objects, similar to comparing primitives. Since equality of object can be very different in the physical and logical sense, and in the case of domain objects it's mostly driven by business rules, comparing objects with "==" operator, introduces subtle bugs, which are hard to find. The difference between equals() and == operator,  one of the Java classics is also asked to find out if the developer is familiar with this important concept or not. Using == operator only make sense when comparing primitives like int, or final constants like Enum. Though there is more involved in comparing two Enum, which you learn by following that link.

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How to declare and initialize a List (ArrayList and LinkedList) with values in Java

Initializing a list while declaring is very convenient for quick use, but unfortunately, Java doesn't provide any programming constructs e.g. collection literals, but there is a trick which allows you to declare and initialize a List at the same time. This trick is also known as initializing List with values. If you have been using Java programming language for quite some time then you must be familiar with syntax of array in Java and how to initialize an array in the same line while declaring it as shown below:

String[] oldValues = new String[] {"list" , "set" , "map"};

or even shorter :

String[] values = {"abc","bcd", "def"};

Similarly, we can also create List  and initialize it at the same line, popularly known as initializing List in one line example. Arrays.asList() is used for that purpose which returns a fixed size List backed by Array. By the way don’t confuse between Immutable or read only List which doesn’t allow any modification operation including set(index) which is permitted in fixed length List.Here is an example of creating and initializing List in one line:

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