On Jan 17, 4:54 pm, "Mark (newsgroups)" <marknewsgro...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Anyway, I took a practice test today so I wouldn't go in to the test
> completely in the dark, and also to get an idea if it was worth me just
> forgoing it altogether. It was 40 questions, 3 minutes each, and I
> scored decently, 78% (better than 78% of people it means) which is
> probably better than I expected, but worse than where I should be if it
> was fresh in my mind. I'm just wanting to know how similar the practice
> test will be to the "real" one the company has asked me to do. Will the
> questions be similar? I even read someone say some are reused. Has
> anyone ever taken one of these tests?

I've taken these tests a few times. There's a limited set of
questions available, so you'll probably see some repeats. My
experience has been that there will always be a few questions that a
good developer won't know, because they essentially test "what happens
when you do something stupid?" The only real use of a BB-style test
is to weed out completely worthless candidates, IMO. Most questions
can be answered with the of a compiler on-hand, so anyone who
does worse than that either doesn't know or doesn't care. 78% is
definitely in the "this person is worth talking to in person" range.

Some other books to add to the list are Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C+
+" and "More Exceptional C++". After reading those books, I found I
was able to look through GCC's STL implementation and understand the
various tricks they were doing much better.

--
Tom