Ask HN: Prepping for a Javascript Interview | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Prepping for a Javascript Interview

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I am interviewing with Khan Academy for a software internship in two weeks. It was suggested that I brush up on my javascript. Herr Resig works there so I imagine they are pretty handy with the language.

I've read The Good Parts, most of Pro Javascript, and working through MEAP JS Ninja now. I am thinking of browsing through the jQuery source in addition to making some neat things to get into the groove again.

Is there a better way to prep than reading books, writing code, and reading code? Perhaps better put: is there anything else that I can do that might be useful?

Thank you for any/all suggestions.

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Perhaps browsing items on Stackoverflow tagged "Javascript"? If you've read The Good Parts (&etc.) and you're comfortable with closures in JS, you'll already be familiar with a lot of the stuff there. Still, you'll find things like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2628672/what-should-every... , which probably contains something you might not know or have seen before.

Good luck to you! Khan Academy is amazing.

Sweet, that stackoverflow article really hit all the stuff I had forgotten. Thank you very much!

JSMentors Mailing list is good. I also found the discussion of how the language works in Section 2 of the TDDJS book really good. ( http://www.tddjs.com/ ). The TDDJS discussion of the language design is really good because it uses testing to show all the ways to create objects and has you test quirky behaviors and oddities each method to really get you to understand the finer points of the language. Think of it as Crockford's "Javascript: The Good Parts, Applied".

Closures, closures, closures. Also, know how JS handles floating point arithmetic, type coercion, threading and the difference between async and sync.

Excellent. Thank you.

By threading, do you mean web workers or using node somehow?

Sorry, should have been more specific. they might ask you if and how JS handles general threading concepts. The correct answer, as you alluded to, is that aside from web workers, JS is not multi-threaded. You could then talk about the challenges of creating complex applications in an asynchronous event driven structure.

In other words, as an interviewer I would ask about threading to filter out the "huh?" type applicants and give them a chance to talk about some of the nuances of working with JS.

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