Philippine Ruby Users Group

Web Developer Interview Questions

Earlier this week, I had to interview a bunch of applicants for a web developer role. The idea is to filter out those who aren’t really experienced as the job asks for people with at least 6 months of experience. Anyway, below is the test I gave them. I don’t feel like giving something like it again in the future (it’s pretty crappy IMHO) so I think it would be a good idea to share it instead of just throwing it away.

Determine whether the statements below are true or false. Be prepared to explain your answer.

1. A primary key can be composed of multiple columns.
2. When you have two tables in a parent-child relationship (i.e. one table has a foreign key referring to the other table) deleting a parent record will delete all child records of that record.
3. Escaping special characters is the best way to avoid SQL injection.
4. You can undo UPDATE and DELETE changes to the database.
5. The VARCHAR data type can be used to save space when used over CHAR.
6. When using an RDBMS, normalization must be done for all tables.
7. Indexes speed up database actions.
8. Foreign keys are usually indexed.
9. Many-to-many relationships are implemented via junction/join tables.
10. Some HTML elements have been deprecated in favor of CSS.
11. The <strong> element can be used interchangeably with the <b> element.
12. Under strict XHTML rules, <br> is not a valid usage of the line break element.
13. The href attribute of the anchor element only accepts relative and absolute links.
14. The image tag is a block element.
15. When a form is submitted, the submitted data is derived from only the input elements inside the form.
16. Multiple elements can have the same id attribute.
17. Web servers serve content at port 443.
18. A web server can identify if a client has visited the website before.
19. POST is idempotent.
20. A browser redirect can be initiated by a response with an empty body.
21. In JavaScript, the var keyword is optional when declaring variables so it can be omitted in all cases.
22. You must specify a function name when declaring JavaScript functions.
23. Ajax will prevent you from performing other actions until the Ajax action is completed.
24. You are limited to using XML in Ajax.
25. You cannot change the values of a class variable.
26. Constructors are instance methods.
27. Polymorphism refers to the ability to define functions to have different behaviors depending on the passed arguments.
28. High cohesion and loose coupling can improve coding speed.
29. You can combine the features of two classes via inheritance.
30. Encapsulation is primarily used for security reasons.

Answers below the cut. Continue reading →

This post by Bryan Bibat is from existence, refactored.