Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions
Teaches the twenty or so patterns that sit underneath almost every coding interview question, so you stop memorising solutions and start recognising problem shapes. Solve one sliding window problem here and you can solve the next forty on your own.
Course
Interview Prep
Design Gurus
6 to 8 weeks
Intermediate
Subscription
The idea
Most people prepare for coding interviews by grinding a list of problems and hoping the right one comes up. That approach scales badly, because there is no end to the list. This course inverts it: it groups questions into recurring patterns such as sliding window, two pointers, fast and slow pointers, merge intervals, cyclic sort, topological sort and the tree and graph traversals, then works through each pattern until the shape is obvious.
Why it works
Interview questions are rarely novel. They are variations on a small number of structures, and the hard part is not the code but recognising which structure you are looking at in the first ninety seconds. Once you can name the pattern, the implementation is something you already know how to write. That recognition is the skill this course is actually training.
How to use it
Do not read it end to end. Take one pattern a week, work the problems without looking at solutions, then reread the pattern introduction afterwards and see what you missed. Pair it with the problem set so you get spaced repetition rather than a single pass.
Best for: anyone with working data structures knowledge who keeps freezing on unfamiliar questions.
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