A Study Plan

This course has thirty nine lessons before the appendix. Almost nobody reads all of them before their interview, and almost nobody needs to.

What matters is the order. The method chapter is worth more than any single case study. The first six case studies are worth more than the last sixteen, because the later ones repeat skills the earlier ones already taught.

Three plans follow, for three amounts of time. Pick the one that matches your calendar, not the one that matches your ambition.

If the interview is tomorrow

About two hours. Skip the UML chapter except for one lesson.

Two case studies is enough to see the structure twice. The parking lot is the question most often asked. The vending machine shows you what to do when a design has a lifecycle, which is the second most common kind of question.

Do not start a third one. Spend any time you have left writing the five steps on a card and reading them until you can say them without looking.

If you have one week

About eight hours, roughly an hour a day.

Day 7 is the day that decides the result. Every other day gives you material. That day proves you can produce it under time pressure.

If you have one month

About twenty hours. This is the plan that finishes the course.

By week three the case studies start to feel repetitive. That is the point at which the method has been learned. Continue anyway, but read faster: check your class list against the stage 1 and stage 2 diagrams, then move to the next one.

If you can only do six case studies

These six cover the skills the others repeat.

Add a seventh if your interviews are at companies that ask for a data structure rather than a product. Design an In-Memory Cache is that question.

The night before

Do not learn a new question the night before. You will not remember it in the morning, and the anxiety of a half understood design is worse than not having read it.

Instead, do three small things.

1. Re-read the time budget in How the Interview Runs. Knowing you are allowed to spend eight minutes on requirements is what stops you rushing.
2. Re-read one case study you have already done, and only its "What we left out" section.
3. Write the five steps from memory. Requirements. Actors and use cases. Classes. Relationships. Code.

If you can write those five steps in order, you have somewhere to start when the interviewer says one sentence and stops talking. That is most of what this round is.

Key Takeaways

• The method chapter is worth more than any single case study. Read it first in every plan.
• Two case studies is enough if you have one evening. Six is enough for most interviews.
• Always write your own requirement list and class list before reading ours.
• Reserve the last day of any plan for a timed run from a blank page.
• The night before, review the time budget and the five steps. Do not start a new question.

That is the whole introduction. You know what the round is, you have seen a complete answer, you know how each lesson is built, and you have a plan. The next chapter covers the notation, beginning with the object oriented basics that the rest of the course uses.