Mastering critical SKILLS for Coding Interviews C++: Part 1

Welcome to one of the unique and special Coding Interviews courses.

This course is all about algorithmic problem-solving for problems mainly from the Leetcode website. Specifically, the medium level frequent interview problems. The goal of this course is to sharpen your problem-solving skills to aid you in ACEing Coding Interviews from FAANG companies. During the course, you won't only be provided with a problem and its solution, but a series of hints and thinking approaches to tackle the problems.

I don't teach data structures or algorithms in this course. You must study these courses from high-quality sources and solve many problems to gain basic problem-solving skills. The problems in this course are of medium level. Without proper background and skills, the materials will be hard to learn.

Part 1 content

• Part one covers the data structures:

  • Arrays: Prefix Sum, Sliding Window (fixed and variable size) 2 Pointers, and Permutations.

    • Tutorials are provided for these topics only, as they are not covered in DSA courses.

  • String

  • Matrices

  • Stack and Priority Queue

  • Linked List and Binary Trees

  • Hash Tables

• The scope of the topics: Interviews coverage.

  • Note: You are expected to solve the implementation problems over these topics during a data structure course. For example, reversing a linked list is a common interview question. I won't cover it. It is mainly an implementation task. The same for the basic binary tree DFS problems. I do cover such questions in my data structure and algorithms course. This course is about problem-solving challenges.

• Although the focus of this part is Data Structures, but still your background in Algorithms is needed.

  • Major: Complexity, Recursion and Sorting

  • Minor: A few times I refer to: Binary Search, Divide and Conquer and Dynamic Programming

  • Generally, most of the problems require serious algorithmic skills

The course level:

• Most of the problems in this course are Leetcode MEDIUM level, which represent 85-90% of real interview questions.

• To be more effective, the questions are mainly the most frequent interview questions according to the LeetCode website.

• This means; in addition to gaining problem-solving skills, you increase the chance of meeting problems you already solved in the interviews!

• Without proper background & skills ⇒ the course will be hard to learn

Prerequisites:

• Strong programming skills & DSA knowledge/skills (from 3 courses)

  • A high-quality programming course consisting of:

    • Good coverage for programming + many exercises on learned topics

    • Proper understanding/using for built-in algorithms/DS (e.g. C++ STL / Java Collections)

    • Optional: Several projects to be comfortable with long coding

  • A high-Quality Data Structure course: good coverage + many exercises

  • A high-Quality Algorithms course: good coverage + many exercises

  • This implies: you already solved and coded a lot. It is time to move to medium challenges.

    • Don't join this course if you lack basic problem-solving skills

The course programming language

• All slides codes are based on C++

  • Mainly C++11. I intend to not use the very modern C++

    • Many people don't study after C++11

    • It will be easier for other programming languages to understand the code

  • C++ code is very similar to Java and C#. To a good extent, similar to JavaScript.

• The LeetCode discussion tab has solutions for many other languages

  • 80% of the problems: I will download solutions for some other languages (Python, Java) .

    • No promise, but some downloads for JavaScript and a few C#

    • As the code is downloaded, expect differences in the code structure. You must understand fully the lecture first.

      
      

The course natural language:

• The course is only in English with an Egyptian accent

• English subtitles are provided to make it easy in case. it is easy to adapt the Egyptian accent

Videos problem-solving cycle:

• Presenting a problem

• Verifying assumptions and test cases

• Trying to brute-force the problem

• Optimizing the brute force if possible

• Or analyzing the problem and test cases

• Several iterative hints are provided; a missing educational key in other resources

• Well-written codes.

2 training styles are possible with the materials.

• A topics-based style where you focus on a specific topic and solving many of its problems. This style has a great disadvantage; you know the solution category (e.g. a stack problem), which is a big hint.

• A blind-based style where sprints of problems are provided. Each sprint is 10 problems to solve.

  • You don’t know the category of the problem.

  • This is a more matching experience to the real interviews experience.

  • This style is the recommended one.

• After the course, you will be provided with more problems to solve on your own to keep enhancing your skills.

  • You must solve a lot to increase your chance of passing the interviews.

    
    

A problem name starts with

• E for easy-level from 1 to 3

• M for medium-level from 4 to 7

• H for hard-level from 8 to 10

Acknowledgement: “I’d like to extend my gratitude towards Robert Bogan for his help with proofreading the slides for this course”