Beginning CoderByte easy tests

[madbernard]

I looked at the Hack Reactor suggestions for what one should be able to do before applying, and headed over to http://www.coderbyte.com to try their easy track. They score submissions based not only on correctness, but on time, which is not at all my bag. I think when I saw that a year ago I just turned away, even though a friend suggested doing it on my own time and then pasting the answer in... I might do that in the future.

Their first question was the exact same as I saw last week; reverse a string. I came up with this, which, amusingly, is not what I did last week. It uses the join method of arrays that I was searching for last week, so I'm pleased that knowledge is in me...

function FirstReverse(str) { 
  var hold = [];
  for(var i = str.length - 1; i >= 0 ; i--){
    hold.push(str[i]);
  }
  var foo = hold.join("");
  return foo; 
}

FirstReverse("stuff");           

Also, heeey, check out the respect of spacing in that code block. I thought there were HTML tags about code, and found <code> and thought that was it... Ben the housemate says code isn't really a HTML tag and turned me on to <pre>. Thanks!

Anyway, a good thing about CoderByte: they let you see what other people did, after, answering the socrating question of my friend Catherine about whether I looked at other people's solutions. There's a solution like mine above, but relying on methods of strings and arrays that I wasn't aware of; and that solution lets one do everything in a single line!

function FirstReverse(str) { 
  return str.split('').reverse().join('');
}

Way more elegant.