Top 10 Courses to Crack Coding Interviews in 2020 - Must Join Best of Lot

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 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.

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 were 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 the 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.

10 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/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, e.g. 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.

1. Data Structure and Algorithms Analysis - Job Interview

This is probably the best coding interview course for Java programmers. Though no programming language is required, if you don't know Java, the author will teach you. 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 Structure 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 Java programmers. If you are looking for a good programming/coding interview course in Java, this is the one. You can use it to start from scratch or just refresh your knowledge before going to an interview.

2. 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 Youbute as CS Dojo Channel and I really like his teaching style.

It's a short course, and I recommend you to take only with 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.

3. 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 patter.

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.

4. Software Engineer Interview Unleashed

This is one of the best courses for coding interviews, created by a former Google Interviewer. If you are a software engineer and you are looking for a job on big tech giants like Google, Facebook, SnapChat, or Airbnb, then this is the right course for you.

It is specially designed for college graduates and junior developers who are looking for a job in big technology companies and startups.

You will not only learn data structure and algorithms and other technical information required for an interview, but also you will get a chance to see actual examples of phone and onsite interviews and see how they are evaluated.

5. Preparing For a Job Interview

This one is another good course for preparing technical job interviews. In this course, John Sonmez from SimpleProgrammer.com has explained what it takes to clear a coding interview.

You will not only learn how to solve a coding challenge on-the-spot but also learn how to tackle tricky questions from the interviewer with respect to complexity and improvement.

The course also includes a blazing fast boot camp for computer science questions about data structures, algorithms, bit manipulation, and concurrency. Overall, a complete package for preparing software job interviews.

6. The Coding Interview Bootcamp: Algorithms + Data Structures

This is a coding interview guide written in JavaScript. The author himself has spent many hours going through interview questions asked at Google, Facebook, and Amazon and shared his experience in answering the question in the right way.

In this course, you will find a huge collection of common algorithm questions, including everything from 'reversing a string' to 'finding leaf nodes of the binary tree.'

The course also provides an overview of the most important data structures for interviews, e.g. list, set, map, stack, queue, tree, etc.

It also provides practical tips on dealing with system design interviews, which is sometimes hard for beginners, given their lack of experience in designing a real-world system.

7. Intro To Dynamic Programming - Coding Interview Preparation

Many Coding problems can be easily solved if you know Dynamic programming, but I have found many developers don't even know about it, including some experienced ones. This course will teach you Dynamic programming to improve your Algorithm knowledge and prepare for the Software Engineering Coding Interview.

You will also learn several 1 dimensional and 2-dimensional dynamic programming problems and how to derive the recurrence relation and write a recursive solution to it, then write a dynamic programming solution to the problem and code it up in a few minutes.

Some of the dynamic programming problems covered in this course are:

1.Climbing stairs

2.Buying and Selling Stock

3.0/1 Knapsack

4.Longest Common Substring

5.Longest Common Subsequence

Overall a good course to learn Dynamic programming. You can take this course even if you are not preparing for a coding job interview, just to improve your knowledge of dynamic programming and algorithms. The course uses both Java and Python, so it's useful for both Java and Python developers.

8. Python for Data Structures, Algorithms, and Interviews!

This is a data structure, algorithm, and coding interview course specially designed for Python developers. It's one of the modern courses and focuses on things like Github and LinkedIn profile to impress recruits.

It also helps you to create a great resume, which many programmers neglect. Remember, it's your resume that gives you a chance of an interview, if it's not good to forget about the job, you won't even get an interview call.

In this course, you will not only learn all major Data Structures and Algorithms but also ace coding interviews after preparing for the course's mock interviews. Overall, one of the best coding interview course for Python programmers.

9. 200+ SQL Interview Questions

SQL queries and database related questions are very common on programming job interviews; hence it's important for a computer science graduates or programmers to prepare SQL questions in advance. This course provides 200+ SQL queries and Questions for Programming job interviews.

10. 200+ Java Interview Questions for Beginners

This course is particularly for Java programmers or developers who are applying for Java developer jobs. Since Java is vast, it's not possible to prepare everything, especially in a short duration of time, and that's where this course rocks. IT provides a good sample of 200+ Java interview questions from different areas of Java.

That's all about some of the best courses to prepare for coding/programming job interviews. As I said, the key to success in the coding interview is the ability to think through the problem and code in real-time. You need a lot of practice to get that. Thankfully there are a lot of websites where you can practice coding questions. Once you have gone through one of these courses, you can try solving my list of 50 coding problems.

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Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like these online courses to prepare well for programming job interviews, then please share it with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.

P.S. - If you prefer books, then you can also check out my list of top 10 books to prepare coding interviews.

P. P. S. - Are you ready for an Interview? Take TripleByte's quiz and go directly to the final round of interviews with top tech companies like Coursera, Adobe, Dropbox, Grammarly, Uber, Quora, Evernote, Twitch, and many more.