Frontend interview preparation roadmap

v1.0.2 by alxolr

This repository is meant to be my preparation roadmap for a medium to advanced frontend interview.

Preparation Topics

• Strategy and Psychology

• Javascript

• Algorithms

• Web Services

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Strategy and Psychology

Ideas on how to be mentally prepared and other points of interest that an interviewer is looking for and want to see in you.

Preparation Material (~3 hours of reading + exercises):

• Cracking the coding interview by (Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell) read the book entirely at least once but as review or fast preparation the first 11 chapters (~170 pages). There are a lot of exercises which you can solve and train one of which can easily be on your interview.

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Javascript

A frontend interview without a solid knowledge of javascript is an utopia. Best books on the market imo are the You don't know JavaScript Series by Kyle Simpson.

Preparation Material (~24 hours of reading):

• You Don't Know JS: Up & Going First book on the series. Is a good introduction on javascript obscure side.

• You Don't Know JS: Scope & Closures. This one is a must read an reread book, explains the code scope and closures, hoisting and other js fundamentals.

• You Don't Know JS: this & Object Prototypes. If you want to understand properly how this works this one is also a core.

• You Don't Know JS: Types & Grammar

• You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance. Review what callback hell is and how to solve it, generators and other advanced async design patterns.

• You Don't Know JS: ES6 & Beyond

After you read all this books start again, and again, each time you will miss something.

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Algorithms

It is a bit of conundrum cause in my experience as a frontend engineer I rarely need to implement an algorithm, but there are no interviews both front and back without algorithm part. For each experienced developer I guess the biggest rust lay down on algorithms.

Preparation material (~1h daily)

Theory

• Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript by Michael McMillan (~250 pages) - Need to work on all the Data Structures [Array, Stack, Queue, List, Tree, Set, Dictionaries, Hashing Tables] etc.

Practice

• Codewars - a very good place to start tons of javascript problems, usually I hang up there when need to train.
• Hackerrank - a better alternative a lot of people are saying, did not check.

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Web Services

Even if in front you do not have to build a web service, you must know what are they, how they work, and how to handle them.

Preparation material (~10 hours)

• RESTful best practices -the most commonly used web service mechanism
• SOAP - lost it's popularity due the complexity
• XML-RPC - rarely used nowadays
• GraphQL -proposed by facebook devs, very promising technology, they aspire to be the market leaders in the next 5-10 years