To be honest with you, getting your first job is never easy. It is, in fact, the most laborious task, and you need to put your best effort into finding a role in your dream company. Most of the computer science graduates dream of working for Google, Facebook,Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are often not able to clear their rigors coding interviews. The single most important reason for failing those coding job interviews is a lack of knowledge and practice; hence, it becomes increasingly important that you prepare hard in advance. Unfortunately, I learned this little too late after spoiling my chances at Microsoft and Amazon, but you can learn from my experience and prepare better for your programming job interviews.
Read more : Top 3 courses to Crack Data Science and Machine Learning interviews in 2023
1. Master the Coding Interview: Data Structures + Algorithms
This is probably the best coding interview course for programmers and developers. Though no programming language is required, if you don’t know JavaScript, the author, Andrei Neagoie still makes it easy to understand. In this course, you will learn how to Analysis algorithms like searching, sorting, and other algorithms.
You will also learn how to reduce the code complexity from one Big-O level to another level, an important skill to impress the interviewer. Furthermore, you will learn different types of Data structures and how to choose the right data structure to solve a problem.
Remember, a carefully chose data structure can drastically improve the CPU and Memory profile of an application. For example, using a set to solve duplicate elements problem make it a lot easier. You will also learn how to find Big-O for every data structure.
By the end, you will be able to write code that runs faster and use low memory. You also will learn how to analyze problems using Dynamic programming, one technique many programmers forgot to prepare.
This is an ideal course for all levels of programmers, particularly JavaScript and Web developers. Btw, If you are looking for a good programming/coding interview course in Java, then you can also check Data Structures and Algorithms: Deep Dive Using Java by Tim Buchalaka. You can use it to start from scratch or just refresh your knowledge before going to an interview.
2. Grokking the System Design Interview
System design is one of the difficult topics to crack on interviews, especially if you haven’t done any practice and solved any system design problems beforehand. Many programmers, both beginners and experienced struggle to solve software design problems as they have no idea where to start and where to finish, that’s where this interactive course helps.
This is one of the godsend resources for anyone preparing for coding interviews. In this course, you will learn how to design software from scratch. You will learn about how different design choices like SQL vs NoSQL makes a big difference.
As part of this course, you will solve many common design problems like how to design vending machines, Twitter, traffic systems, URL shortener services, etc. This will give you enough experience and knowledge on how to tackle system design problems in a real interview.
If you are serious about your coding interview, I strongly suggest you solve some system design problems given in this course. You can buy this course for $14.9 or you can join the Educative platform, one of the best places for interactive coding interview courses to access all of their course for just $18 per month.
Read more : Top 3 courses to Crack Data Science and Machine Learning interviews in 2023
3. Master the Coding Interview: Big Tech (FAANG) Interviews
If you are looking for a comprehensive online course to prepare for big tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, NetFlix, and Google, collectively known as FAANG companies then you will love this online course by Andrei Negaoie and Yihua Zhang on ZTM Academy.
This 37 hour long online coding interview course is one of the best designed and up-to-date course and gives you step-by-step guide and framework for solving their toughest technical questions! You will also learn tips & tricks from instructors who have worked for big tech companies and actually gone through and passed their interview process
The course not only prepare you for essential coding interview topics like dat structure and algorithms, system design, database and SQL but also gives you a mental framework on how to approach solving coding problems so that you can become a better problem solver and answer ANY unknown question interviewer throws at you.
If you are serious about your chances at FAANG companies then I highly recommend this course to start with. Btw, you would need a ZTM membership to watch this course which costs around $39 per month but also provides access to many super engaging and useful courses like this one. You can also use coupon code FRIENDS10 to get a 10% discount on this course or any subscription you choose.
Read more: Top 3 courses to Crack Data Science and Machine Learning interviews in 2023
4. 11 Essential Coding Interview Questions + Coding Exercises!
No interview preparation is done until you solve some of the most common questions asked in job interviews. This course provides how to solve 11 such questions in a step-by-step manner.
The best part of this course is the instructor, Y K Sugi, who has worked in Google as a Software engineer. He is also very famous in YouTube as CS Dojo Channel and I really like his teaching style.
It’s a short course, and I recommend you to take only another course, but it’s good for learning how to approach a completely unknown problem based on your existing knowledge of data structure and algorithms.
5. Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions
This is another good interview refresher kind of course for anyone preparing for coding interviews. Unlike previous courses that focus on concrete problems, this course focus on underlying patterns. Once you know the pattern, you can literally solve 10s of coding problems based upon that pattern.
This means instead of solving hundreds of Leetcode coding problems. You can just master these 15 underlying patterns to interview questions, and you’ll be able to tackle anything you face in the interview. This would save a lot of time and if you have a coding interview coming up next week, this is the course you should join.
In general, all the courses which have “grokking” before them on Educative, are exceptionally well put together! These courses magically condense 3 years of CS in short bite-size courses and lectures (I have tried System Design, Object Oriented Design, and Coding patterns).
The Grokking courses are really great for preparing an interview and I recommend all three Grokking courses on Educative I mean this one, System Design and Object-Oriented Design.
So, the big question comes, how do you prepare for coding/programming job interviews? Which subjects to read? Which questions to solve? How to deal with coding and other technology-related questions?
When I was hunting for my first job, there wasn’t much help available, we totally relied on our textbooks of programming language and data structure to prepare for interviews, but things have changed in the last 10 years.
Nowadays, you not only have dedicated books to prepare for coding interviews, like the Crack the Coding Interview Questions but also you have online courses and coding boot camps to practice for coding interviews. I really like BootCamps because of their methodology, focus, and rigorous practice, but they are expensive, and not every programmer can afford that.
The next option is online courses, which are both cheap and provides you similar kind of interactive guidance you get in Coding boot camps. There are a lot of coding interview courses available on popular course sites like Udemy and PluralSight, but you need to choose the right course, which can help you to achieve your goal.
5 Data Structure and Algorithm Courses for Programming Interviews
In this article, I am going to share some of the best online courses to prepare for Coding and Programming Job interviews, based upon your experience and skill set you can choose one or two courses from this list to prepare for your next job interview.
Most of these courses are focused on Data Structures and Algorithms, which are the most important topic for any coding interview, but they also teach you problem-solving, and other aspects of a Job interview, like questions from a programming language like Java and C++, Database, and SQL concepts, Linux commands, etc.
Once you have gone through one of these online training courses, you would have enough knowledge to take on your job interview as well as know where to go for further improvement. (*)