Overview

There are many levels of competence for a Java developer and many different areas of specialisation. In this article I wan to focus on the online technical test, an increasingly popular form of technical assessment.

General Advice

Practice, practice, practice. The first you do, depending on your skill level, knowledge and experience will usually be your worst. Technical tests do not measure your value as a person or potential employee, and do not always even test your expertise in that area. They are however a necessary part of the process for some companies.

• Know your language fundamentals
• Know how to compile and run your Java apps from command line and from an IDE
• Practice analysing scenarios into common patters of algorithms
• Be familiar with the format of technical tests
• Tests are timed and often are in an online IDE with poor quality interfaces and little or no debugging
• Do the practice tests over and over

Java Test Practice

There are many excellent ands diverse resources to practice Java online; some of these websites, such as Codility, might even be the one your hiring manager sends you!

• https://www.codewars.com/?language=java
• https://codility.com/demo/take-sample-test/
• https://codereview.stackexchange.com/

Java Test Solutions

• https://www.martinkysel.com/codility-solutions/
• https://github.com/jmornar/codility-java-solutions/tree/master/src

References

• https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/
• https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/
• https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/
• http://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/java/11cheatsheet/