Ask HN: How do I prepare myself for a algorithms' exercise

8 points·sedeki··6 comments

So I have a test coming up. It involves solving some problems that have time and space constraints. How can I prepare for this?

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Practice on existing problems. Check out https://www.hackerrank.com/ and https://code.google.com/codejam. I particularly like Google Code Jam because they provide an analysis on how to approach these kinds of algorithm exercises.

LeetCode has a great collection of problems that you can practice with and test your solution in the browser (https://oj.leetcode.com/). The discussion sections were helpful as well.

GeeksforGeeks also has a collection of problems and analyses (http://geeksforgeeks.org/fundamentals-of-algorithms/).

So after refreshing yourself on the fundamentals, practice, practice, practice. Hope this helps!

Practice, practice, practice will work 99% of the time. But it's worth refining your approach to problem solving for when a question is thrown at you and no answer immediately comes to mind. I can ping you some pointers - drop me an email at: sian.roberson@oxfordknight.co.uk

Good luck with your test!

Study similar problems, of course. Develop test problems that you would give to an imaginary candidate, ie try to think of problems and constraints of your own. Also, devise a test-taking algorithm to minimize the time loss of unsolved questions.

This book was very useful to me: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets...

I've always found browsing through my old algorithms text books to refresh myself helps a lot.

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