Striver A2Z vs Love Babbar 450 vs Apna College

Ankit Kumar — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 03:08:26 +0000

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

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.

How to Revise DSA in the Final Week Before an Interview

Ankit Kumar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:08:15 +0000

The week before an interview is for making sure what you already know is instantly retrievable under pressure, not for learning anything new. The mistake almost everyone makes is treating the final week like prep week two: grinding fresh problems, panicking at gaps, and walking into the interview tired instead of sharp.

You cannot re-solve 370 problems in seven days, and you shouldn't try. Revision is a different skill from learning, and it has its own method: spaced repetition, fast recall passes, and timed re-solves of only the patterns you're shaky on.

The core idea: recall beats re-solving

Re-solving a problem you already cracked is mostly wasted effort; you're rehearsing a win. Revision should spend its time where retrieval is weakest. So most of your final week is a fast pass, not coding, built on three moves:

Read the statement. Ten seconds, no more.
Guess the approach out loud. Name the pattern, the data structure, the complexity. "Sorted array, pair sum: two pointers, O(n)."
Verify against your one-line note. If your guess matches, mark it solid and move on in under a minute. If it doesn't, that problem goes on the re-solve list.

This read-guess-verify loop lets you cover 40-50 problems an hour. You proved you can code weeks ago. This pass checks that you can still recognise the shape fast, which is the part that decays.

Revise your weak spots, not the whole sheet

The honest constraint: you have time to deeply re-solve maybe 30-40 problems this week, not 370. So the whole game is choosing the right 30. Those are the problems you flagged, peeked at the solution for, or got stuck on the first time. If you tracked your prep honestly, this list already exists. DSA Tracker tracks your progress and runs AI skill analysis as you go, so your weak spots are already on record. Your revision list builds itself instead of relying on memory of what felt hard a month ago.

If you didn't track anything, spend the first hour doing the read-guess-verify pass across your sheet and writing down every problem where the guess failed. That failure list is your week.

The day-by-day plan

Day	Focus	What you actually do
1	Triage	Fast pass across Tier-1 topics; build the weak-pattern list.
2	Weak pattern A	Timed re-solve of 6-8 flagged problems in your weakest pattern.
3	Weak pattern B	Same, for your second-weakest pattern (usually DP or graphs).
4	Company top 50	Filter to your target company's recent questions; read-guess-verify all of them.
5	Re-solve misses	Timed re-solve of anything you missed on Day 4. This is the highest-yield day.
6	Mixed mock	Two timed problems blind, narrating out loud. Simulate the real thing.
7	Light + rest	One fast pass over your one-line notes. Stop by evening. Sleep wins interviews.

Timed re-solves: 25 minutes, hard stop

When you do re-solve, do it under a clock. Give yourself 25 minutes per medium problem and stop dead when time's up, even mid-solution. The interview is timed; your practice should be too. Untimed re-solving builds false confidence: you feel fluent because you had unlimited time, then freeze when the clock is real. After the 25 minutes, read the optimal approach, update your one-line note, and move on.

The company top-50 filter

Generic revision is fine, but the final 48 hours should narrow hard. Pull your target company's frequently-asked list (most are public on the usual platforms) and run the read-guess-verify pass over those specifically. Companies reuse questions and lean on particular patterns; a fintech backend loop looks nothing like a product-company frontend loop. If you know the topics that show up most and overlay the company's tendencies on top, you walk in having rehearsed the most likely material instead of a random sample.

What not to do

Don't start a new sheet. Switching sources in the final week resets your sense of progress and teaches you nothing.
Don't chase hard problems you've never seen. A new hard problem you fail at on Day 6 only dents your confidence. Stick to problems you already know.
Don't skip sleep to cram. A rested brain recognises patterns faster than a fried one. The last night is for rest, not Tier-3 trivia.

If you're reading this and the interview is further out, you're better off building the foundation first; see the 90-day placement plan and come back to this revision system in the final week. Last-mile revision only works when there's something to revise. Track your weak spots as you go, and the final week stops being a panic and becomes a checklist.

Related on DSA Tracker

Originally published on DSA Tracker, a free site to learn, practise and revise DSA with an in-browser compiler, aptitude practice and mock interviews.

DEV Community: Ankit Kumar

Striver A2Z vs Love Babbar 450 vs Apna College

What the overlap looks like in numbers

Related on DSA Tracker

How to Revise DSA in the Final Week Before an Interview

The core idea: recall beats re-solving

Revise your weak spots, not the whole sheet

The day-by-day plan

Timed re-solves: 25 minutes, hard stop

The company top-50 filter

What not to do

Related on DSA Tracker