Who Should Take This Course?

You may know this feeling. You have solved a few hundred practice problems. Then a new one appears, and you still do not know where to begin.

Random practice does that. Each solved problem gives you one answer, and interviews rarely repeat exact questions. This course teaches the technique underneath instead. Once you have it, a question you have never seen looks like one you have already solved.

Who this course is for

You are preparing for your first coding interview. The course opens with easy warmup problems, and the difficulty grows slowly. Every solution is explained step by step.

You work as an engineer, but you have not interviewed in years. Most day jobs rarely ask for algorithm work, so the skill weakens with time. This course rebuilds it in an organized way, one technique at a time.

You practice a lot but stopped improving. If every new problem still feels new, you are collecting answers, not techniques. Learning the pattern behind each answer fixes that.

Your interview is soon. You do not have time for a thousand problems, and you do not need it. One pattern, learned properly, covers dozens of problems at once.

What you need before starting

This course assumes three things.

• Common data structures. Array, LinkedList, HashMap, Stack, Queue, Heap, and Graph. You should know what each one stores and what it is good at.
• Big-O notation. You should be able to look at a loop and name its cost.
• Recursion. You should be able to read a function that calls itself and say what it returns.

If you want to review these first:

• Data structures: Grokking Data Structures for Coding Interviews
• Recursion: Grokking the Art of Recursion for Coding Interviews
• Big-O: Big-O Algorithm Complexity

What you do not need

• Prior interview practice. Every problem starts at the statement and explains each step to the answer.
• A computer science degree. The three items above are the whole requirement. Where you learned them does not matter.
• A fixed choice of language. Every problem is solved in Java, Python, C++, JavaScript, C#, and Go. You can switch languages inside the code editor on any problem.

Where to go next

The next lesson explains what a coding pattern is and what this course contains. The one after it answers the practical questions: the right order, the right pace, and when to read a solution.

For feedback, comments, or suggestions, write to us at contact@designgurus.org.

Happy learning!
Arslan Ahmad