Java LinkedList documentation:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/LinkedList.html

Here are some good resources to learn Java programming.

1. Oracle Technology Network – java.sun.com

   This is the official Java developers’ website. It has all the information you need. It provides some interesting sections such as developers’ spot light, blogs, information about various Java technologies top downloads, and links for community. It is useful to get technical updates on Java, different IDEs and libraries.

2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_programming_language

   Wikipedia has always been a first-stop for learning something new, and it is also a hub for Java programmers too!  Whether you are looking for some basic Java concepts or looking for the list of the Java libraries,

You are playing the following Flip Game with your friend: Given a string that contains only these two characters: + and -, you and your friend take turns to flip two consecutive “++” into “–“. The game ends when a person can no longer make a move and therefore the other person will be the winner.

Write a function to determine if the starting player can guarantee a win.

For example, given s = “++++”, return true. The starting player can guarantee a win by flipping the middle “++” to become “+–+”.

Follow up:
Derive your algorithm’s runtime complexity.

Given a stream of integers and a window size, calculate the moving average of all integers in the sliding window.

For example,
MovingAverage m = new MovingAverage(3);
m.next(1) = 1
m.next(10) = (1 + 10) / 2
m.next(3) = (1 + 10 + 3) / 3
m.next(5) = (10 + 3 + 5) / 3

Analysis

We can use a bounded queue to record the last n integers in the window, and define a variable sumN to record the sum of the numbers in the window.

Each time when a new number is registered,

In this post, I walk through the concept of Java HashMap, and use examples to describe its usage cases. 

What is HashMap

Java HashMap is a Hash table based implementation of the Java Map interface.  It provides all of the optional map operations, and permits null values and the null key.  The order of Keys in a HashMap is not guaranteed. So we should not reply on the order of the keys in a HashMap. 

HashMap vs Hashtable

Based on java doc, Java HashMap class is roughly equivalent to Hashtable, except that it is unsynchronized and permits nulls.

Java Map

Java Map is an interface with the following signature. 

public interface Map<K,V>

Here are some properties of Java Map:

1. It defines an operation to map keys to values.
2. A map cannot contain duplicate keys; each key can map to at most one value.

3. The Map interface provides three collection views, which allow a map’s contents to be viewed as a set of keys, collection of values, or set of key-value mappings.

4. The order of a map is dependent on its implementations. 

In this post, I will use examples to show how to use Java Sorted Map. A SortedMap is a Map that sort its entries in ascending order according to the keys’ natural ordering, or according to a Comparator provided at the time of building a SortedMap. SortedMap is useful if you want to quickly locate an entry that is larger than a specified key. For example, it can be used to implement a Consistent hash. 

Since the entries in SortedMap are sorted by keys, all the keys in a sortedMap must implement the Comparable interface or provided a comparator when creating the SortedMap.

In Java, it is straightforward to sort objects of the predefined class such as Integer, Double, Float and String. This is because these classes have been implemented the Comparable interface.  Comparable defines a natural ordering, as when you’re defining it, you specify which one is  considered “less than” or “greater than” the another.

How can you sort custom Objects? For example, suppose you have a list of objects of Student class, which has name, age, and score attributes. You may want to sort the students by their scores. Another example is to sort a list strings by their length. 

In this post, I will describe five ways to implement the Singleton pattern in Java. They are Synchronization the getInstane() method,static final variable, using double checking lock with volatile keyword, using SingletonHolder, and Enum.

1. Classic Java Singleton pattern

The following code is the simplest implementation of Singleton Pattern in Java. However it is not multiple thread-safe. 

The singleton pattern implemented in the above example is easy to understand. We maintain a static reference to the singleton instance and returns that reference from the static getInstance() method. We also make the Constructor private,

Count word frequency is a popular task for text analysis. In this post, I describe how to count word frequency using Java HashMap, python dictionary, and Spark. 

Use Java HashMap to Count Word frequency

{a=5, b=2, c=6, d=3}

Use Python Dict to count word frequency

The output:

{‘a’: 5, ‘c’: 6, ‘b’: 2, ‘d’: 3}

Use Spark to count word Frequency

The above method works well for small dataset. However, if you have a huge dataset, the hashTable based method will not work. You will need to develop a distributed program to accomplish this task.