Michael Inden - Java Challenges: 100+ Proven Tasks that Will Prepare You for Anything

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.

The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

First of all, thank you for choosing this book. Here you will find a wide range of practice exercises on a broad mix of topics that will improve your knowledge in an entertaining way. It can also help prepare you for job interviews and will certainly help improve your problem-solving skills.

We all know the saying practice makes perfect. Day-to-day life involves a lot of practice, and serious training and exercising is undertaken for specific disciplines such as sports, music, or art. But the serious case or competition is rare. Oddly enough, this is often significantly different for us software developers. We actually spend almost all of our time implementing and tend to rarely spend time practicing and learning, sometimes not at all. Why is that?

Presumably, this is due to the time pressure that usually dominates and the fact that there is not much suitable exercise material availableeven if there are textbooks on algorithms as well as books on coding. But, often they are either too theoretical or too source code-focused and contain too little explanation of the solutions. This book aims to change that.

So how did I come to tackle this book project (originally written in German)? There are several reasons. On the one hand, I was asked again and again by mail or personally by participants in my workshops, if there was a tutorial book as a supplement to my book Der Weg zum Java-Profi [Ind20a]. Thats how the first idea came about.

What really triggered the whole thing was that a recruiter from Google approached me quite by surprise with a job request. As preparation for the upcoming job inter- views and to refresh my knowledge, I started to search for suitable reading material and developed some exercises for myself. In the process, I discovered the great, but also partly quite challenging, book Cracking the coding interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell [McD16], which inspired me further.

A few months after publishing the German version of this book, I translated and finished this English version due to the support of the people at Apress.

This book is explicitly not intended for programming novices but is aimed for readers who already have basic or even good knowledge of Java and want to deepen it with exercises. By solving small programming exercises, you will expand your knowledge about Java, algorithms, and sound OO design in an entertaining way.

In general, I use the masculine form to keep the text easier to read. Of course, I include all female readers, and I am pleased about them.

A wide-spread mix of exercises on different topics is provided by this book. Some- times some puzzles may not be of direct practical importance, but indirectly, because they improve your creativity and your ability to find solutions.

In addition to exercises and documented solutions, each topic covered in the book starts with a short introduction. By this, even those readers who may not have built up a lot of know-how in specific areas benefit. You can then use the introductions to get to grips with the exercises up to about the medium level of difficulty. In each subject area, there are always a few easier exercises to get you started. With a little practice, you should also be able to tackle more difficult problems. Occasionally there are some really challenging problems, which experts can try their hand at, or those who want to become experts.

This book is packed with various practical tips. They include interesting background information. Besides, pitfalls are pointed out.