Interview experience for perl developer with booking.com

Recently I had an opportunity to give the interview for booking.com for perl developer.

I got the call from the HR after 2 week from the CV submission date. Initial HR round was very simple . Introduction about the company and kind of work you are expected to do, the team strength etc

The online interview with the technical people was arrange after 2 people with 2 perl developer. The interview was about perl.



The question were as follows; I have created the gist for the question on github.

	=head Question1
	You have the file with word at a single line.
	#input sample file
	abactor
	abaculus
	abacus
	Abadite
	.
	.
	Zyrenian
	#Output
	******************************************************************a
	*************b
	**********************************c
	**********************d
	*******************************************************************************e
	a) you have to count the character and create a histogram in alphabetical order.
	b) now you have to produce a histogram with max 80 character in line in reference to max count
	c) now same out based histrogram based on the character count
	=cut
	#!/usr/bin/perl
	use warnings;
	use strict;
	my %wordCount = ();
	my $normalfac = 0;
	open(my $fh,"$ARGV[0]") or die "cnot open file : $!\n";
	while (<$fh>) {
	chomp;
	foreach (split("",$_)) {
	my $char = $_;
	if (exists $wordCount{$char}) {
	$wordCount{$char}++ if ($char=~/[a-z]/i);
	}
	else {
	$wordCount{$char} = 1;
	}
	if (exists $wordCount{$char} &&
	$normalfac < $wordCount{$char}
	) {
	$normalfac = $wordCount{$char};
	}
	}
	}
	local $\ = "\n";
	#a
	foreach (sort {$a cmp $b} keys %wordCount) {
	print "*" x int(($wordCount{$_}*80)/$normalfac),"$_";
	};
	#b
	foreach (sort {$wordCount{$b} <=> $wordCount{$a}} keys %wordCount) {
	print "*" x int(($wordCount{$_}*80)/$normalfac),"$_";
	};
	=head Question2
	You have datastructure
	my $users = [
	{
	name => 'John',
	score => 10,
	},
	{
	name => 'Bob',
	score => 1,
	},
	{
	name => 'Carlos',
	score => 5
	},
	{
	name => 'Alice',
	score => 5,
	},
	{
	name => 'Donald',
	score => 7
	}
	];
	now u have to arrange the name with highest to lower score,
	if score is same than in alphabetical order
	#expected output:
	# John
	# Donald
	# Alice
	# Carlos
	# Bob
	=cut
	my %hash=();
	foreach (@$users) {
	$hash{$_->{name}} = $_->{score};
	}
	foreach (sort {$hash{$b} <=> $hash{$a}} keys %hash) {
	print "$_\n";
	};
	#
	=head Question3
	you have an array @names = qw(John Donald Alice Carlos Bob)
	you have ton find out the length using map funtion?
	now you have to filter name with less than 4
	=cut

view raw booking.pl hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Though I was able solved all the question put by them , but took few hints from the interviewer, which seems to the reason to be not selected for the amsterdam trip.
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