My Top 3 Sources to Learn About Algorithms.
As a recent graduate of Flatiron School and I assume like many other boot camp graduates, most of us probably still don’t know much about algorithms or how to measure their efficiency. But after graduation, I figured it was important to learn about them. After I got my hands on a book called “Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions”, I was introduced to big O notation. It’s a concept that I have previously never heard about, but as it was one of the first things introduced in the book, I assumed it was something quite important. After reading that chapter two times, I was still confused because a lot of the words that the author used were very foreign to me.
However, even though I knew that it was a complex topic that I would not have the time to fully comprehend before my first interview with a company, I decided to take the challenge to learn it.
In this blog, I want to share some of the sources I am using to learn about algorithms.
The first one is of course “Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions” a book written by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, who’s a very well-known best-selling author and Software Engineer that has had multiple offers from companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and many other big tech companies. The scope of the book is quite comprehensive and extends to concepts far outside the knowledge gathered at boot camp. I found the first 5 chapters of the book especially helpful in giving insight into what to expect from the interview process from some of the big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and so on.
The second source, I want to introduce is Codewars. At codewars.com you can find many different code challenges you can use to practice to prepare for technical interviews. You can even choose the language of your preference and the difficulty level. I started at 7kyu level in Ruby since I found my Ruby skills to be stronger than my skills in JavaScript. However, I regularly switch it up by doing some of those code challenges in JavaScript so that I don’t get rusty.
The third one and probably my favorite one I’ve used to learn about algorithms is teamtreehouse.com. I started my journey into coding there. It’s amazing the way they can break down complex concepts into something that with only the basics of coding, anybody can understand. The way it works is basically like this: a team treehouse instructor gives you a lecture by using very minimal technical language and helpful analogies that make it easier to understand the concepts. During the lecture, you can utilize the workspaces which are an online environment already set up for you so that you can follow along with the instructor. This makes the class more interactive and helps the students to reinforce the knowledge they learn. Then there are quizzes every 3 or 4 lessons we need to complete. And last but not least, is the amazing team treehouse community that is always there to help you if you have any questions in any of the lectures.
I recently had an interview with a startup company here in Houston, Texas and with just the help of these three sources, I was able to complete two of the three code challenges I was given and perform competently in the third. Also, these three resources helped to increase my technical vocabulary with terms that I was not very used to before such as the time complexity and the space complexity of an algorithm. Overall this experience learning about algorithms has made me realize how much I still need to learn and also that the chance I took to go to a boot camp and learn how to code turned out to be the best decision of my life.
