The best way to prepare for coding interviews is really a function of two things:
- Leetcode fitness
- How much time you have
Ideally you want as much of each possible but we live in the real world where time is scarce and engineering expertise doesn't translate to leetcode fitness.
1. Basics
Say you have all the time in the world; you're not actively interviewing but you want to stay sharp. You want to master all the fundamentals. Read these books then solving as many as 500 leetcode questions, at least 100 hard.
2. Test
Having mastered the basics you should be comfortable testing your knowledge with the popularized 75 random questions like:
These lists have a good mix of easy, medium and hard questions that are likely to asked in interviews. You want to ace them within a month of your interview(s).
3. Refresh
After testing yourself, you may find gaps in your knowledge or techniques you haven't seen before. You want to double down on Dynamic Programming or Graph Algorithms. This is where focused courses come handy. There are many offerings out there, most of them touch each subtopic lightly. I have a better proposition; focused courses that actually develop your intuition.
Check out my courses on Dynamic Programming and Bit Manipulation (Btw, this is free!). I bet you'll complete them algorithmically fit, otherwise let me know I'll issue a refund.
Happy coding!
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