Striver A2Z, Love Babbar 450, and Apna College are the most common resources for data structures and algorithms preparation. Each sheet serves a different purpose based on your current skill level and timeline. Apna College suits beginners, Striver A2Z provides a structured path for those with basic knowledge, and Love Babbar 450 offers a broad checklist for intermediate students. Choosing one and completing it is more effective than switching between them.
| You are… | Start with | Then |
|---|---|---|
| New to DSA | Apna College | Striver A2Z |
| Know basics, 3+ months out | Striver A2Z | Love Babbar 450 for breadth |
| Strong, <6 weeks out | Love Babbar 450 | Role-filtered revision |
What each row assumes about you:
Apna College is for the absolute beginner who learns best alongside video and wants momentum early. It is the most beginner-friendly of the three, tightly coupled to its free lectures, smaller and more curated, and it prioritises understanding over volume. You will outgrow it. Treat it as the on-ramp, then move to A2Z or the 450 for depth.
Striver's A2Z is for someone who wants a path, not a pile. It is less a sheet than a course: it walks from "Learn the basics" through advanced topics in a deliberate dependency order, each step gated behind the last, roughly 450+ problems across clearly defined steps. The ordering removes "what next?" paralysis, which is why it is the second stop for a beginner and the first for anyone with the basics and three or more months. The caveat is length. Finishing A2Z is a multi-month commitment; pace yourself or you will stall at step 7.
Love Babbar's 450 is for the intermediate student who already knows the basics and wants broad coverage fast. It is the classic topic-bucketed checklist: 450 problems grouped by topic (arrays, matrix, strings, … graphs, DP), flat, with no enforced order and no hand-holding. The flatness helps you sweep breadth quickly in under six weeks. Without discipline, it also makes it easy to over-index on early topics like arrays and never reach graphs and DP, which is where interviews are won. Pair it with your target role deciding the order rather than the sheet's, so the last row of the table is a role-filtered revision and not another top-to-bottom march.
What the overlap looks like in numbers
Merging the three sheets and removing duplicates leaves 370 unique problems across 22 topics. Striver A2Z contributes 315 of them, Love Babbar 450 contributes 248, and Apna College contributes 104. Seventy-five problems appear in all three, and that set is where the sheets agree on what an interview will ask: Two Sum, Valid Parentheses, Reverse Linked List, Maximum Subarray, 3Sum, Merge Intervals, Number of Islands and Climbing Stairs among them. The topic balance also differs from what the sheets' own ordering suggests: Dynamic Programming has 51 problems and Graph has 48, while Queue has 4 and Intervals has 5. A student who works any sheet top to bottom reaches those two large topics last, which is the opposite of how interviews weight them. So let a role, not a sheet, decide the order.
Related on DSA Tracker
- Striver A2Z tracker
- Love Babbar 450 tracker
- Apna College sheet tracker
- Consensus 75
- Blind 75 vs NeetCode 150 vs Striver
Further reading: Dynamic programming on Wikipedia.
Originally published on DSA Tracker, a free site to learn, practise and revise DSA with an in-browser compiler, aptitude practice and mock interviews.
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