How to use Leet Code effectively for interview preparation?
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Leet code is indeed one of the best resources or compilation of interview questions for aspirants.
I started preparation using Leet Code few months back. Initially, I was confused and it was difficult for me to find how to use Leet Code Effectively.
You you have huge list of questions and you are not able to solve first few when you start interview preparation, it is easy to get de-motivated.

Hoever, finally with coupl eof week practice and changing my way I was utilizing leetcode, I discovered a mantra that worked perfect for me.

Why I need Mantra?

  1. It's important to revise basics but sometimes revising take all the time and you loose the motivation.
  2. Interview is scheduled in 3-4 weeks and I don't know where to start. When I google it, there is huge stream of search results that come and you ended up on some different topic than what you initially started with after few minutes of searching and around the internet.
  3. Don't know which resouces are useful. There is no single compilation where I know if I follow these steps I'll clear Big interviews.

The Mantra is simple:

  1. Analyze how much time you have in your next interview.
  2. Select a progamming language you want to start preparation in.
  3. Check if you know basic data structures and how they work. If you don't know pausing at the moment and understanding the basic data structures is the next step here. By data structures, I mean knowing Arrays, String, List, LinkedList, Tree, Binary Search Tree, Graph, Hash Maps.
  4. Make sure you understand different Searching and Sorting algorithms.
    Binary Search, Bubble Sort, Insertion Sort, MErge sort, HEap Sort, Qucik Sort, Interpolation Search, Find the Kth smallest and largest element in unsorted array, Search element in a sorted and rotated array.
  5. At this point, you should be comfortable with data structures, Searching, Sorting and space time complexities.

It's time to start working on algorithms. I recommend using Top 10 interview questions for each data strcuture. That covers almost all the concept. Divide your time into all these topics. Take one topic, understand its algorithm and find all question related to that topic in leet code.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/top-10-algorithms-in-interview-questions

An excel sheet that I find helpful in finding related leet code questions:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SbpY-04Cz8EWw3A_LBUmDEXKUMO31DBjfeMoA0dlfIA/edit#gid=972946549

This post is incomplete. And I'll update it soon with more resources, personal excel sheet and jupyter notebook where I maintain all questions, their best solution.

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