You should have answers prepared for these questions.

1. Describe your ideal job and/or boss.
2. Why are you looking for a job? Why are leaving your current position?
3. What unique experience or qualifications separate you from other candidates?
4. Tell me about yourself.
5. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
6. Describe some of your most important career accomplishments.
7. What are your short-term/long-term goals?
8. Describe a time when you were faced with a challenging situation and how you handled it.
9. What are your salary requirements?
10. Why are you interested in this position? Our company?
11. What would your former boss/colleagues say about you?
12. What are the best and worst aspects of your previous job?
13. What do you know about our company?
14. What motivates you? How do you motivate others?
15. Are you willing to relocate?

Don’t forget to write a brief ‘Thank You’ note to the person or people who interviewed you.   You may be the only candidate who performed this small courtesy!

Hiring is one of the hardest parts of managing a team. A lot is riding on the initial meeting, and if you’re nervous or ill-prepared — or both — it can make you do strange things. The following mistakes are all too common, but they’re easy to avoid with some advance preparation

#1: You talk too much

When giving company background, watch out for the tendency to prattle on about your own job, personal feelings about the company, or life story. At the end of the conversation, you’ll be aflutter with self-satisfaction, and you’ll see the candidate in a rosy light — but you still won’t know anything about his or her ability to do the job.

#2: You gossip or swap war stories

Curb your desire to ask for dirt on the candidate’s current employer or trash talk other people in the industry. Not only does it cast a bad light on you and your company, but it’s a waste of time.

#3: You’re afraid to ask tough questions

Interviews are awkward for everyone, and it’s easy to over-empathize with a nervous candidate. It’s also common to throw softball questions at someone whom you like or who makes you feel comfortable. You’re better off asking everyone the same set of challenging questions — you might be surprised what they reveal. Often a Nervous Nellie will spring to life when given the chance to solve a problem or elaborate on a past success.

#4: You fall prey to the halo effect (or the horns effect)

If a candidate arrives dressed to kill, gives a firm handshake, and answers the first question perfectly, you might be tempted to check the imaginary “Hired!” box in your mind. But make sure you pay attention to all the answers and don’t be swayed by a first impression. Ditto for the reverse: The mumbler with the tattoos might have super powers that go undetected at first glance.

#5: You ask leading questions

Watch out for questions that telegraph to the applicant the answer you’re looking for. You won’t get honest responses from questions like, “You are familiar with Excel macros, aren’t you?”

#6: You invade their privacy

First of all, it’s illegal to delve too deeply into personal or lifestyle details. Second, it doesn’t help you find the best person for the job. Nix all questions about home life (“Do you have children?” “Do you think you’d quit if you got married?”), gender bias or sexual preference (“Do you get along well with other men?”), ethnic background (“That’s an unusual name, what nationality are you?”), age (“What year did you graduate from high school?”), and financials (“Do you own your home?”)

#7: You stress the candidate out

Some interviewers use high-pressure techniques designed to trap or fluster the applicant. While you do want to know how a candidate performs in a pinch, it’s almost impossible to re-create the same type of stressors an employee will encounter in the workplace. Moreover, if you do hire the person, he or she may not trust you because you launched the relationship on a rocky foundation.

#8: You cut it short

A series of interviews can eat up your whole day, so it’s tempting to keep them brief. But a quick meeting just doesn’t give you enough time to gauge a candidate’s responses and behavior. Judging candidates is nuanced work, and it relies on tracking lots of subtle inputs. An interview that runs 45 minutes to an hour increases your chances of getting a meaningful sample.

#9: You gravitate toward the center

If everyone you talk to feels like a “maybe,” that probably means you aren’t getting enough useful information — or you’re not assessing candidates honestly enough. Most “maybes” are really “no, thank yous.” (Face it: The candidate didn’t knock your socks off.) Likewise, if you think the person might be good for some role at some point in the future, he or she is really a “no.”

#10: You rate candidates against each other

Mediocre candidates may look like superstars when they follow a dud, but that doesn’t mean they’re the most qualified for the job. The person who comes in tomorrow may smoke all of them, but you won’t be able to tell if you rated mediocre candidates too highly in your notes. Evaluate each applicant on your established criteria — don’t grade on a curve.

1. How can we repair a MySQL table?
2. What are the advantages of stored procedures, triggers, indexes?
3. What is the maximum length of a table name, database name, and fieldname in MySQL?
4. How many values can the SET function of MySQL take?
5. What are the other commands to know the structure of table using MySQL commands except explain command?
6. How many tables will create when we create table, what are they?
7. What is the purpose of the following files having extensions 1) .frm 2) .myd 3) .myi? What do these files contain?
8. What is maximum size of a database in MySQL?
9. Give the syntax of Grant and Revoke commands?
10. Explain Normalization concept?
11. How can we find the number of rows in a table using MySQL?
12. How can we find the number of rows in a result set using PHP?
13. How many ways we can we find the current date using MySQL?
14. What are the advantages and disadvantages of Cascading Style Sheets?
15. What type of inheritance that PHP supports?
16. How can increase the performance of MySQL select query?
17. The structure of table view buyers is as follows:

    +----------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
    +----------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | user_pri_id | int(15) | | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
    | userid | varchar(10) | YES | | NULL | |
    +----------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

    the value of user_pri_id the last row 2345 then What will happen in the following conditions?

    Condition1: Delete all the rows and insert another row then. What is the starting value for this auto incremented field user_pri_id ,
    Condition2: Delete the last row(having the field value 2345) and insert another row then. What is the value for this auto incremented field user_pri_id

18. What are the advantages/disadvantages of MySQL and PHP?
19. What is the difference between GROUP BY and ORDER BY in Sql?
20. What is the difference between char and varchar data types?
21. What is the functionality of md5 function in PHP?
22. How can I load data from a text file into a table?
23. How can we know the number of days between two given dates using MySQL?
24. How can we know the number of days between two given dates using PHP?
25. How can we change the name of a column of a table?
26. How can we change the name and data type of a column of a table?
27. What are the differences between drop a table and truncate a table?
28. When you want to show some part of a text displayed on an HTML page in red font color, what different possibilities are there to do this? What are the advantages/disadvantages of these methods?
29. When viewing an HTML page in a Browser, the Browser often keeps this page in its cache. What can be possible advantages/disadvantages of page caching? How can you prevent caching of a certain page (please give several alternate solutions)?
30. What are the different methods of passing data or information between two calls of a web page? What are the advantages/disadvantages of these methods?
31. An Apache web server is running on a Linux system. Suddenly, the web server delivers the pages very slow. How could you find out possible reasons for that (when using system commands, please specify their names)?
32. What are the different ways to login to a remote server? Explain the means, advantages and disadvantages?
33. Please give a regular expression (preferably Perl/PREG style), which can be used to identify the URL from within a HTML link tag. Example: The regular expression should match the tag <A HREF=”http://www.yoursite.com/”> and give the URL (”http://www.yoursite.com /”) as a return result. Tags should also be matched if they contain other attributes than the HREF attribute.
34. A select query over a large table runs very slow because of the growing number of entries in that table. What different measures could be taken to improve speed?
35. A company wants to store their invoices in a database. They already have their customers and articles in that database. Both customer and article are each identified by an unique integer value. Please create the SQL statements for creating the necessary table(s) for storing the invoices in a MySQL database. An invoice should hold information like invoice number, customer, date, article(s) and quantity etc.
36. For the database from the previous question, please give an SQL query which returns the invoice number of all invoices which contain the article with the number “1234″. The query should be able to run under a MySQL 4.0 database.
37. How would you backup and restore a big MySQL database? What are the advantages of the approach which you have taken over the others?
38. Create a PHP web script with the following attributes: on start, three HTML form elements are shown: an string input field, a checkbox field, a dropdown/pull down list with 5 elements and a submit button. On submission, the form should be redisplayed (while remaining all options/inputs as the user has selected/entered them). Additionally, the selections/inputs of the user should be displayed in text. Please solve this without the use of any external libraries.
39. What is MIME?
40. What is PEAR in PHP?
41. How can I use the COM components in PHP?
42. How can I load the DLLs dynamically?
43. How many ways we can give the output to a browser?
44. How can we know that a session is started or not?
45. What is the default session time in PHP and how can I change it?
46. What changes I have to done in PHP.ini file for file uploading?
47. What are the differences between MySQL_fetch_array(), MySQL_fetch_object(), MySQL_fetch_row()?
48. How can I set a cron and how can i execute it in Unix, Linux, and windows?
49. Steps for the payment gateway processing?
50. How many ways I can register the variables into session?
51. Explain different types of errors in PHP (i.e. arguments in errorreporting function)?
52. How many ways I can redirect a PHP page?
53. List out different arguments in PHP header function?
54. What type of headers have to add in the mail function in which file a attached?
55. What is the difference between <?PHP and <? And which is preferable?
56. What are the differences between include() and include_once() functions?
57. Describe the importance of database abstraction layers in PHP and database connection?
58. Explain MySQL optimization?
59. What is the difference between using copy() and move() function in PHP file uploading?
60. What is the difference between Reply-to and Return-path in the headers of a mail function?
61. Explain about Type Juggling in PHP?
62. How can I get the only name of the current executing file?
63. How can I embed a Java program in PHP file and what changes have to be done in PHP.ini file?
64. How can I find what type of images that the PHP version supports?
65. The table tbl_sites contains the following data:

    -----------------------------------------------------
    Userid sitename country
    ------------------------------------------------------
    1 sureshbabu indian
    2 PHPprogrammer andhra
    3 PHP.net usa
    4 PHPtalk.com germany
    5 MySQL.com usa
    6 sureshbabu canada
    7 PHPbuddy.com pakistan
    8. PHPtalk.com austria
    9. PHPfreaks.com sourthafrica
    10. PHPsupport.net russia
    11. sureshbabu australia
    12. sureshbabu nepal
    13. PHPtalk.com italy

    Write a select query that will displayed the duplicated site name and how many times it is duplicated? …

osted some detailed answers on his blog.

1. What are the differences between Get and post methods in form submitting, give the case where we can use get and we can use post methods?
2. Who is the father of PHP and explain the changes in PHP versions?
3. How can we submit a form without a submit button?
4. In how many ways we can retrieve the date in the result set of mysql using PHP?
5. What is the difference between mysql_fetch_object and mysql_fetch_array?
6. What is the difference between $message and $$message?
7. How can we extract string ‘webbyinfo.com ‘ from a string ‘http://www.webbyinfo.com’ using regular expression of PHP?
8. How can we create a database using PHP and mysql?
9. What are the differences between require and include, include_once?
10. Can we use include (”techinterviews.php”) two times in a PHP page “makeit.PHP”?
11. What are the different tables present in mysql, which type of table is generated when we are creating a table in the following syntax: create table employee(eno int(2),ename varchar(10)) ?
12. Functions in IMAP, POP3 AND LDAP?
13. How can I execute a PHP script using command line?
14. Suppose your Zend engine supports the mode <? ?> Then how can u configure your PHP Zend engine to support <?PHP ?> mode ?
15. Shopping cart online validation i.e. how can we configure Paypal, etc.?
16. What is meant by nl2br()?
17. Draw the architecture of Zend engine?
18. What are the current versions of apache, PHP, and mysql?
19. What are the reasons for selecting lamp (linux, apache, mysql, PHP) instead of combination of other software programmes, servers and operating systems?
20. How can we encrypt and decrypt a data present in a mysql table using mysql?
21. How can we encrypt the username and password using PHP?
22. What are the features and advantages of object-oriented programming?
23. What are the differences between procedure-oriented languages and object-oriented languages?
24. What is the use of friend function?
25. What are the differences between public, private, protected, static, transient, final and volatile?
26. What are the different types of errors in PHP?
27. What is the functionality of the function strstr and stristr?
28. What are the differences between PHP 3 and PHP 4 and PHP 5?
29. How can we convert asp pages to PHP pages?
30. What is the functionality of the function htmlentities?
31. How can we get second of the current time using date function?
32. How can we convert the time zones using PHP?
33. What is meant by urlencode and urldocode?
34. What is the difference between the functions unlink and unset?
35. How can we register the variables into a session?
36. How can we get the properties (size, type, width, height) of an image using PHP image functions?
37. How can we get the browser properties using PHP?
38. What is the maximum size of a file that can be uploaded using PHP and how can we change this?
39. How can we increase the execution time of a PHP script?
40. How can we take a backup of a mysql table and how can we restore it. ?
41. How can we optimize or increase the speed of a mysql select query?
42. How many ways can we get the value of current session id?
43. How can we destroy the session, how can we unset the variable of a session?
44. How can we destroy the cookie?
45. How many ways we can pass the variable through the navigation between the pages?
46. What is the difference between ereg_replace() and eregi_replace()?
47. What are the different functions in sorting an array?
48. How can we know the count/number of elements of an array?
49. What is the PHP predefined variable that tells the What types of images that PHP supports?
50. How can I know that a variable is a number or not using a JavaScript?
51. List out some tools through which we can draw E-R diagrams for mysql.
52. How can I retrieve values from one database server and store them in other database server using PHP?
53. List out the predefined classes in PHP?
54. How can I make a script that can be bilanguage (supports English, German)?
55. What are the difference between abstract class and interface?
56. How can we send mail using JavaScript?