Intro

I gave a talk at my local ACM about how to prepare for technical interviews. It’s a topic not emphasized on much at my school and I wanted to give students some advice about starting and what helped me.

Algorithms

• Learn about Big O notation and try being able to recognize their O(time).
• Perform two sortings. O(nLog(n)) QuickSort & Merge Sort maybe familiar yourself with others
  • Tree Traversals
  • in, post, pre
  • order,
  • breadth/level
  • depth
• tree structures, binary, trinary, heap trees, AVL
• Graph problems… Dijkstra, A, common n = np problems. Know Edges and Vertices.
• Learn about what n = np problems. and what makes it a n=np problem.

Links

General Review and Tutorials

• http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials&d2=alg_index

Videos

• Open Source CourseWare MIT http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
• Harvard CS50 http://www.youtube.com/user/cs50tv
• Tree’s sheet from Stanford

Google Recruiter Suggested Tips

I got these really helpful tips from a recruiter from Google. They sent me this email for the new interview round info.

• https://gist.github.com/stanzheng/9631465
• http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials&d2=alg_index
• http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs106b/chapters/13-trees.pdf

StackOverflow Questions

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/210829/what-is-an-np-complete-problem
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/111307/whats-p-np-and-why-is-it-such-a-famous-question
• Quick vs Merge http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7878768/when-to-use-merge-sort-and-when-to-use-quick-sort
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4421706/operator-overloading

Notes

• Use quick if you can but doesn’t always guarantee nlog(n) and can become O(n^2)
• Merge sort is the best alternative when no Random Access (Stack, Queue, list) of the structure
• Heap sort is also in there if quicksort starts degenerates