I have an interview for a C++ internship position. Now, the thing is I\'ve taken

Question

I have an interview for a C++ internship position. Now, the thing is I've taken two out of three quarters of the basic CS classes (in C++) at my community college and we covered the basics up to arrays, pointers, linked lists, recursion, etc (basically all of Walter Savitch's Absolute C++ book).

I spoke to the interviewer on the phone and he said the interview will include technical questions on trees, hashes, probably some sorting algorithms, and other stuff like that. I have less than a week to prep for the interview.

What can I do to familiarize myself with the absolute, bare, essentials of the aforementioned interview question topics?

Or, is it just a waste of time for me until I take the next class that covers all of those things?

Explanation / Answer

You could try to get the material for the class about algorithms and data structures. There is a lot of theory behind those things, but I don't think they'll ask you in depth about that for an internship, so you don't have to really get behind the material, but it helps to have read at least the introductions for popular algorithms and to know what they do.

You probably should know how Bubble Sort, Merge Sort and Quick Sort work (they're a popular selection of sorting algorithms, though there are many more). Maybe the Wikipedia articles on those are sufficient to get the algorithm. You should also implement them. It's not that difficult, and it will greatly help you to understand the algorithms. Same thing with trees and Hashmaps/Hashtables, try to understand the concepts and implement them. Linked Lists belong in that category as well as a typical data structure. Graph algorithms are interesting as well and would most likely be covered in the material for the corresponding graph, but sorting and data structures probably takes precedence.

The interview itself is not going to be a waste of time. It's going to give you experience, no matter how it works out. And unless you abuse the interviewer or something like that, a failure will most likely also not burn bridges at the company - you're a student and improving, so you can always reapply under the premise that you have worked hard and are much better equipped then.

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