SPUG: PERL technical interview

[Creede Lambard]

Come up with a good way to reverse a string. I get asked that about two out
of three interviews, it seems like. Oh, and no one seems to like 

  print join ('', reverse( split (//, $string)));

which seems unfair to me. I mean, if they're going to expect me to use Perl,
I should be able to use Perl, not use Perl in a particular way they mandate
(they seem to always want something that uses substr).

You might also just want to go through a basic reference like O'Reilly's
Perl Pocket Reference. In my experience the interviewers usually just ask
simple stuff, like the aforementioned revering a string. I've had them ask
me how to determine the intersection of two arrays (e.g. find the common
elements between qw( a b c d e ) and qw( a h j c r ) and similar relatively
simple problems. The most complicated question I ever had was how to create
a system for parsing a particular kind of configuration file. The
interviewer and I ended up collaborating on a pair of LIFO stacks working in
tandem. (I got that job, by the way!)


On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 11:06:07PM -0800, Islandman wrote:
> I have some job interviews coming up, one in PERL where I'm to do the "code
> this on the fly on the whiteboard" exercise. I've worked in PERL quite a bit
> over the years but during the last 2 years have had my mind warped by .NET
> work and frankly feel awfully rusty for such an instant recall exercise. 
> 
> What would you recommend for a quick cram to try to be as ready as possible
> for such an interview?
> 
> Thanks,
> -Brian
>  

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