Any one herewith real life data structures working experience ? Need advice

[manoj srinivasan]

I am Currently studying Data structures ,I Am following mark allen wise(May be i misspelled the author name hehe..) book,the syllabus was huge,I was just looking at a beginner level knowledge,So i shared my view with one of my friend He urged me to study stack,queue,All kind of linked lists,tree basics,binary tree,binary search tree,tree traversals(i.e inorder,preorder,post order),And one type of graph ,i forgot that name.

My questions is

1) how much of data structures knowledge we need to have as a beginner to become a C/os PROGRAMMER ? ESPECIALLY WHEN ATTENDING INTERVIEW ?

2)for implementing each concepts such as stacks,trees there are some basic implementations like array implementation,single,double,circular,single-circular,double-circular Linked lists.
And i am seeing many variations of each implementation here

http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-structures/

Do we need this much of knowledge on the selected topics in order to get a job or up to what level of programming they will be expecting us to do in the basics of data structures ?


Can some one share your toughts and experience ?

[Scott Shipp]

Yes, I think you could encounter every kind of data structure and algorithm question if you interview to become a software engineer. A strong understanding of data structures, including how to choose the best one for practical everyday problems, is generally considered the most important aspect of being a software engineer. I have ten years experience as a software engineer at this point. When I interview candidates, I usually ask an open-ended question like, "You are writing software for a rental car company to track its schedule. It eventually needs to be able to keep track of when a fleet of 50 cars is rented out, and quickly be able to tell me things like which cars are available on a certain set of dates. Let's say the company is just getting going though, and they have three cars for rent only. What data structure would you use for the schedule? How would you give availability on a certain date?"

Many of my coworkers who do interviews do more common questions like, "Given a binary search tree of int values, write code to find the second to lowest int." Or another common one, "Given an array of random, unsorted integers, how would you go about finding the first two that appear in the array whose sum is 10."

Anyway, it is good to learn all that your friend recommended.