Tag: Object Oriented

How to prepare for a Technical Interview

With April being the graduation month here in the Philippines, you’ll be seeing fresh graduates in various forums and discussion groups looking for advice on how to pass technical interviews. Here’s one posted over at the PHP Users Group forum earlier today:

Can you help me with this? I’m going to take a technical written exam for a job i’m applying. Here is the list of what are expected on the exam:
-Basic Programming
-OOP
-recursive programming and variables in programming
-? statement
-conditional statements
-loop statements
-flowcharting
-pseudocodes (strings,odd/even)
Can you guys give me tips and heads up on where to focus and what to expect on the exam? The exam will be next week and I want to be prepared for it. Thanks in advance.

PS: Hindi ko alam kung anong programming language ung eexam. (I don’t know what programming language will be used in the test)

Whenever I see these type of questions, the first thing I do is give a ಠ_ಠ to my monitor. The listed coverage above is so basic that every 2nd year college student should have no problem with it.

It’s like a carpenter asking what tool to focus on when applying for a carpenter position: screwdrivers, hammers, saws, or measuring tape? Yes, it’s that basic.

Unhelpful snarkiness aside, what advice would I give to these fresh grads?

Continue reading “How to prepare for a Technical Interview”

Refactoring

Refactoring

Refactoring is a term you’ll hear thrown around a lot in software engineering discussions. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you might assume based solely on the content of those discussions that it’s a mystical advanced programming technique known only to experienced developers.

But what exactly is refactoring?

Continue reading “Refactoring”

Object Oriented Principles

  • Encapsulate what varies.
  • Favor composition over inheritance.
  • Program to interfaces, not implementations.
  • Strive for loosely couple designs between objects that interact.
  • Classes should be open for extension but closed for modification.
  • Depend on abstractions. Do not depend on concrete classes.
  • Only talk to your friends.
  • Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
  • A class should only have one reason to change.

Continuing from the basics of OO, we now move on to its principles. The list above is taken from the wonderful book Head First Design Patterns and it enumerates some of the most important principles in OO. I’ll explain briefly what each principle means below the cut.

Continue reading “Object Oriented Principles”

Object Oriented Programming Basics

sample OO class diagram

As you may already have read in my previous posts, one of my biggest pet peeves in the IT industry today is that a lot of people are using Object Oriented Programming (OOP) without even understanding the basic concepts behind it. They’re not using OOP for its benefits over the previous generation’s simple structured procedural programming; they’re using it simply because the language they’re coding in is OOP (e.g. Java, .NET).

To put it bluntly, it’s like writing spaghetti code in a structured programming language.

With this being my perspective about the local status quo, I feel that I have to post about the basics of OOP before moving on to the other fun stuff related to programming.

Continue reading “Object Oriented Programming Basics”