CS Level Up Series Introduction

What is this series about? What are the goals?

Leveling up my knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and system design. The goal is to become a badass.

What is the format? How will you achieve this?

Right now the plan is as follows:

1. Do some prep work to learn basic algorithms and data structures. I will be mostly following Heapclub's (a now closed interview prep company) curriculum (curriculum here). The goal is to know all of this like the back of my hand. If I have time I will also do the maths section

2. After the prep work I am going to follow a similar approach to the one outlined here. I will use Leetcode.

3. To understand more about Operating Systems, Networking, & Systems in general I will use the following resources:

   • A gentle introduction to multithreading
   • Process, Threads and Synchronization
   • Threading in C#
   • Operating Systems notes
   • Web Systems
   • Concurrency: Mutual Exclusion and Synchronization
   • Networking notes
   • TCP vs UDP
   • Networking Zine
   • What every developer should know about TCP
   • SYN cookies ate my dog - breaking TCP on Linux
   • How a SQL database works

4. At the same time, or perhaps at the conclusion of the above steps, I will be watching all the system design videos from the following YouTube channels: Tech Dummies - Narendra L, Success in Tech, Tushar Roy's System Design Playlist, & Gaurav Sen's System Design Playlist

5. To get even more System Design knowledge, I will be reading the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications. I will try to read this book twice.

6. To solidify design patterns knowledge, I will use the content from Source Making's Design Patterns.

7. (Optional) There is the possibility I will read + complete all the relevant sections of CTCI. Specifically, these sections are: Math & Logic Puzzles, Object-Oriented Design, System Design & Scalability, Testing, Java, Databases, Threads & Locks.

8. (Also optional) SQL resources:

   • Easy SQL Questions
   • Medium-Hard SQL Questions

9. Other resources I will be consulting:

   • Alorithms (Sedgewick)
   • The Algorithm Design Manual (Skiena)
   • The internets

Curriculum that might not exist on Heapclub, but that I have come across in forums/articles/books that could be useful to learn (if time permits). Here is list of topics that seem important (in perceived order of priority):

• Know common problems: Fibonacci, Valid/balanced parenthesis, palindrome/anagrams of strings, Traveling Sales Person, Knapsack Problem, Longest Common Subsequence (using dynamic programming, bottom-up with a matrix).
• Disjoint-Set/Union-Find
• Sliding Window
• Rabin-Karp
• Binary Indexed Tree (Fenwick Tree)
• Bipartite graphs (Checking if a graph is bipartite)
• Iterators and associated problems (Flatten a nested list iterator, design a skip iterator, merge K sorted iterators)
• Minimum Spanning Trees
• Fibonacci Heap and it's guarantees
• Either KMP or Z Algorithm (choose one)
• Segment Tree
• Suffix Tree (without worrying about compression + understand what Ukkonen's algorithm is) &/or Suffix Array
• Line Sweep (geometry related, problems: Rectangle Intersection & The Skyline problem)

Allotted time for this project: 12-18 months.

Who are you?

Bootcamp grad with 5.5 years Software Engineering experience. I have done some basic algo/ds stuff in the past, but not much - and I've forgotten almost all of it. I'm terrible at maths, and I suck at recursion.

(Please note that I previously linked to this blog post & this other post - which appears to have taken the content directly from Heapclub whilst removing vital information.)