Placement Preparation for IT Companies: 1

This article is for non CS students who are preparing for placement in an IT company. The views expressed are my personal and you may always find a better way to prepare. One has to focus on these 5 subjects i.e. C, C++, data structure, aptitude, operating system ( very rarely companies ask questions from OS to non CS guys.)

1. C ( or procedural programming)

All of us have read basics of programming language in in our first year C++ course. Hence you should not spend much time in very basic things such as data types, variables, control statements, loops etc. Every book has initail 3 or 4 chapters dedicated to them. So if you are comfortable with them, finish all such chapters in one or two readings. Important points can be listed as -

Bitwise operators i.e. &, |, ^

Arrays, multi dimension array, arrays and pointers

Calling a function by value, pointer and referance ( reference will come in C++)

Pointers – Read this this throughly. If possible, from more than one source.

String – Another very important topic. Pointers and strings. And there are many ways of playing with strings. More than one source recommended.

Recursive functions

Storage modifiers auto, register, static, extern (just remeber the definition)

Preprocessor and macros

Memory allocation function malloc,calloc, free etc.

Structures. Bit fields. Pointers and structures.

Some basics of file IO.

This should take you a week. Solve the programming examples. By solving I mean practice writing code, don't run it on computer.

Books to refer – Yashwant Kanetkar, Balasubramanim. Read only one book. Just for pointers and strings take help of the other.

2. C++ (or Object Oriented Programming)
Now you must we happy because you already know what first 5 or 6 chapters of any C++ book are gonna teach you. You can jump over to OOP.

Revisit pointers, strings and array once. New and delete operator.

Principles of OOP – abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. You must be able to explain them with examples from real life and code.

Classes, constructor, destructor, function overloading, operator overloading.

Inheritance, virtual functions, function overriding, abstract class etc

Book – I read SCHAUM’S OUTLINE OF PROGRAMMING WITH c++.

Days required 7 to 10 days

3. Data Structure
CSE and ECE students study this subjects in their second year. They should go through at least till binary search trees. Other branch students may just focus on link lists, searching and sorting and the basics of other topics.

Time and space complexity

Searching algos – Binary search

Sorting algos – Bubble sort, Modified bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, quick sort and heap sort.

Also always remeber their time complexity, which is used when

Stacks ans queues

Trees, mainly binary search trees (BST)

Heaps

Hash table

I refered to 'Data Structure through C++' by Yashwant Kanetkar. Dr. Niyogi's lecture slide are also good and give quick referene to the topics.

4. Aptitude

Students tend to take this part lightly. But all companies ask questions from aptitude regardless which profile they belong to. So devote some time to it. Practice some question to gain speed and accuracy. If you are preparing for CAT, apti will be piece of cake for you. You can refer to R. S. Agarwal aptitude book if you don't feel confident.

5. Operating System
Few companies asked question from this section. I did not prepare for it. If you have time you can directly search OS question for interview.

Once you are done with the theory of a particular topic solve as many question you may find. Search for previous year placement papers and practice writing the code.

If you have any question or suggestion, leave it in the comment.