I signed up for a CS degree largely based on the assumption that graphs and trees and nodes and pointers and etc are all secret CS degree topics you can only be good at if you studied them in school. Now I’m literally in a DS&A CS class and it’s so dense/academic that I literally go to YouTube and search the topic to more quickly understand it.
Assuming you’re older, with a family etc, and don’t have the time to devote to learning the “art of computer science,” are you best off just jumping into LC problems and learning patterns and basic info to solve problems?
I’m honestly shocked to discover that a CS graduate probably has to spend an equal amount of time/effort cranking LC than a non graduate. I assumed their degree taught them this stuff and they can kind of just wing it…
Please share your experience
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comments
leetcode is just an application of your learning - you can take it as interview prep but at the end of the day it’s a form of ds&a practice. It’s a deeper application than the surface learning you did in school. I remember my ds&A course - so many concepts were poorly explained and skipped over. I wish I did leetcode to solidify the learning back then - instead I had to fill the gaps when I entered the industry after I graduated. In school what happens is you don’t really deeply learn concepts most of the time. You take the course, get some grade, write the exam and then move onto the next thing. It doesn’t really evaluate how well you learned a particular concept. I’d argue this is the reason why most students / cs grads even struggle so much with DP. It’s because when they learned recursion - they didn’t really learn recursion, they couldn’t visualize recursion or draw parallels with trees, graphs or the stack.
So to your statement that you are shocked that a cs grad has to spend the same if not an equal amount of time, just speaks to how ineffective most schooling is *on its own*. Assignments and exams are not enough to really learn these concepts for most. Some people are able to deeply understand these concepts from day one without the additional practice on leetcode or whatever. But for most - I’d argue leetcode is their ds&a course.