Q: Given a database of all the known stars, describe how you would determine the 200 stars closest to Earth. What is the efficiency of the algorithm you described? A

“Write a function for in-order binary tree traversal.”

“Design a restaurant reservation system.”

“Write a function that takes in a list of numbers and returns the number of even numbers in the list.”

Here’s a little about Amazon Web Services, taken directly from the Amazon.com Website:

Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) exposes Amazon’s product data and e-commerce functionality. This allows developers, web site owners and merchants to leverage the data and functionality that Amazon uses to power its own e-commerce business. ECS 4.0 makes it extremely easy for developers to build rich, highly effective web sites and applications.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Amazon Historical Pricing

The Amazon Historical Pricing web service gives developers programmatic access to over three years of actual sales data for books, music, videos, and DVDs (as sold by third-party sellers on Amazon.com). Sellers can use Amazon Historical Pricing to make informed decisions on pricing and purchasing.

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call – the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available.

Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time.

Alexa Site Thumbnail

The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access to Alexa’s large and growing collection of images, gathered from its comprehensive web crawl.

This web service enables developers to enhance web sites, search results, web directories, blog entries, and other web real estate with Alexa thumbnail images. Including web site thumbnails improves user experience by allowing end users to preview sites before clicking on the thumbnail’s associated link.

Alexa Top Sites

The Alexa Top Sites web service provides access to lists of web sites ordered by Alexa Traffic Rank. Using the web service developers can understand traffic rankings from the largest to the smallest sites. The service enables users to page through the list 100 web sites at a time, and by making multiple requests, to retrieve lists of any size – be it the top 1,000, 5,000, or 100,000 web sites.

In addition to Alexa Traffic Rank, the information returned for each web site includes the number of page views the site receives per million users, the average page views per user, and the number of Alexa users visiting the site.

Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS)

The Alexa Web Information Service makes Alexa’s vast repository of information about the traffic and structure of the web available to developers.

Service Highlights

• 
  Gather information about web sites, including traffic data, contact information, related links and more.
  
• 
  Access historical traffic data for web sites to analyze growth and understand the effects of specific events on web site traffic.
  
• 
  Build a web directory into your web site or service using an Alexa enhanced DMOZ-based browse service.
  
• 
  Access the list of sites linking to any given site.
  
• 
  Use the Alexa web map to analyze the link structure of the web without the content. Use the page-to-page links-in and links-out information to invent wholly new search engine algorithms.
  

Service Highlights

• 
  Comprehensive: Based on 300 Terabytes of Alexa’s web crawl.
  
• 
  Relevant : Advanced relevance algorithms provide highly pertinent search results.
  
• 
  Configurable: Filter search results by passing in over 50 different search fields.
  
• 
  Customizable: Advanced users can build new search index files that can be incorporated into the Alexa search engine.
  
• 
  Cost-effective: Pay a low rate, and only for what you use.