Python Interview Questions

[Tim Chase]

>> Good luck with your interviewing and hope this helped,
>>
>> -tkc
> 
> Well, I was looking exactly for this. Many thanks to you Tim. After
> going through your list I came to know that I know nothing in Python
> and have to catch up a whole lot.

It was certainly not an exhaustive list of "you must know 
everything on this list or else you'd never get hired", or 
conversely, it's also not a "if you don't know everything on this 
list, you're not worthy to call yourself a Python programmer".

It's a way I've found to gauge what somebody means when they say 
the program in Python.  I've had the gamut of folks where that 
phrase means anything from "I glanced at some Python code once" 
to "I'm Guido" (okay, so that's a bit of hyperbole, but you get 
the idea).  My goal is to use as few questions as possible to 
flush out just what an interviewee mean by "I program in Python".

Hanging out here on the c.l.p list will introduce you to a lot of 
these ideas on the sly.  For my "basic" categories, 
lists/tuples/dicts/sets as well as list-comprehensions show up 
here regularly; I've answered several on basic file processing in 
the last day or two (iterate over a file object, doing something 
with each line); you see truth-testing regularly (and 
chastizement when folks do things like "if foo == True"); you see 
basic exception handling...all the basic stuff is regularly 
covered/used here.

Knowledge of the available system libraries comes with using them 
and having need for them.  I'm still learning it.  I finally 
tired of writing my own command-line parsers and investigated 
what the std. lib had to offer, only to find that optparse did 
everything I needed: cleanly, readably, and extensibly.  So now I 
use that instead.  That sort of experience only comes from time 
emersed in using Python to solve problems.

All that to say, don't sweat it too badly, and that fortunately 
Python is an easy language to work with.

-tkc