Yet another LeetCode post
Okey! I have embarked on the journey and started doing LC with all seriousness sometime back. Never have I felt so inadequate and dumb in my career until this. I am able to do the easy ones, but my own solutions hit at best 50% - 70% efficiency as per LC results. Can do some medium ones, but for most I give up after half an hour of struggle that takes me no where. Background : non-CS grad. Front end dev + UX designer. Have been coding in JS for 7 years. What I feel is my fundamental DS and algo concepts are shaky. I mean I am comfortable doing arrays, stacks/queues etc, mostly because I use those on a daily basis. But when it comes to trees, graphs, sorting, searching, even recursion, I struggle. Anyone with similar struggle ? How did you overcome that ? Did you just power through the LC and learn through that process, or did you go back to basics before attempting LC ?
Spend 30min to 1hr on a question. If you canāt get it, look at the solution and make sure you understand it well. After a while you will start seeing patterns for each ds. Study with a group helps. Did that for 6 months, doubled my TC!
Think for 15 minutes on the problem, outline the solution. Then look at best solutions, pick one you like and implement on your own. Donāt waste your time trying to solve it yourself beyond first 15 mi s This is the most efficient way to learn.
Problem solving is an applied skill. It requires applying tools you already have to find a solution. If you donāt have the tools (trees, graphs, recursion) you probably wonāt learn them by trying to do problem solving.
Donāt worry too much about percentages for JS theyāre pretty inaccurate, Iāve seen 20% then 90% the second time submitting an identical solution. Big O is probably all you should care about.
Good to know, I have observed the same few times.
Hope shitty LC practices die soon.
CTCI. Seriously, just read the damn book.
You mean reading a summary of topics or solutions as well if one couldn't solve the problems?
Just read the whole book. She surveys data structures at a level deep enough to pass interviews.