The Coding Interview Bootcamp
Algorithms + Data Structures

Short answer, yes. it will seriously benefit you in the long run.

Longer but also short answer, maybe start with a Data Structures and Algorithms course on udemy or something, perhaps one that's in a language you're already familiar with. Then proceed to casually work on some leetcode problems at your leisure, a couple a week. It's empowering to gradually learn these concepts and problems without the imminent rush of trying to be prepared for an interview opportunity you didn't think you'd get. The one that really got me seriously understanding the concepts and not just memorizing them is https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/

I only got to Calc A in high school. Dropped out of my difficult math classes in college. Stephen Grider's interviewing class on Udemy was pretty helpful for me. https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/

Most of them are genuine. Whether it is worth the price is another story. My personal rule is to never buy courses that are more than $30. I personally love this coding interview course by Stephen Grider and this data structure course by Mosh Hamedani, both of which were pretty helpful when I was interviewing for my current mid-level job

Hey man, there’s hope! I was in a similar position, although not quite as large of a gap, and I’m about to start my first full time job as a junior full stack engineer. I also felt pretty despondent during the job search and had the same anxiety around never being good enough for a job and the thing I learned is this: you can’t control what an employer will think about your experience but you can control how prepared you are. Focus on preparing yourself and just keep applying. Here are a few other things I learned in my job search:

A) When it comes to entry level positions, employers care way more about your recent projects than they do about your last job. Make sure those projects are as tight as they can be. And practice talking about your project in a technical way - be sure that you can explain how all of your functions work, what their runtime is and why you chose to to implement them in that way. Also think about how you could make your project more performant because you will for sure be asked that.

B) I HIGHLY recommend contributing to an open source project - stay away from huge frameworks like React as they have lots and lots of folks already contributing and try to find smaller projects that need lots of help. Employers love to see open source contribution on your resume and it’s a great discussion point in an interview.

C) Make sure your whiteboarding skills are good to go. I found this Udemy course to be really helpful. From there I moved on to interview cake, which was kicking my ass but teaching me a ton as well. These courses really helped me when it came to technical interviews.

D) I suffer from social anxiety too so this one was really hard, but maybe the most important advice I can give - do not underestimate the power of networking. I was lucky enough to have a few friends in the tech industry who let me raid their LinkedIn contacts and I would ask my friends to introduce me to people working in companies I wanted to work for. I’d buy these folks coffee and just talk to them about their experience and usually, if they liked me, they’d offer to help put my resume in front of someone important. I got most of my coding interviews this way and I made some really cool friends. It was harrowing and uncomfortable but it was extremely effective at getting me in the room where it happens.

I hope this helps. For the longest, I didn’t think I was going to get a job, or even an interview, but I just kept working and turns out no one really cares what you did before, only what you can do for them now.

I really enjoyed Stephen Grider's algorithm class -- I think a lot of this came from HackReactor work: https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/

There's a Udemy course (which is on special as we speak), that teaches you how to ace these interviews. It's from Stephen Grider, a very well respected person in the open source and node communities.

I haven't done this course as yet, but have worked through many of his other courses and they are of great quality. All the best 👍.

https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/

Are you talking about Data structures and Algorithms? They can be learned on YouTube and on udemy.I feel like people get a bachelors degree to get cleared by the HR I mean everything that they teach you in college can easily be learned online and in most cases for free.And thats why colleges are charging us so much for a bachelors degree because they know how bad we need them.if companies drop the degree rule completely you will probably be able to get bachelors for much cheaper.But I do agree with you a degree will make sure you understand the fundamentals it’s just they shouldn’t be so expensive to obtain lol

As a dev who's entirely self-taught, my advice would be to go straight to the diploma that you want, and just supplement it with online resources. There's no way the diploma will be difficult enough to justify the time commitment of an entire Cert IV, especially compared to the quality of content you can find online.

To begin with for free, you can find a ton of tutorials on Youtube, but quality varies, and you'll typically get patchy coverage of what you're learning, which might end up making the process longer than it needs to be. Academind make great courses and have a lot of free content on Youtube, like this 5hr beginners javascript video. Also Max is super charming.

I personally have gotten great results from Udemy. Their pricing model sucks but the content on there is fantastic. You can get an excellent quality 50+hr course for 12-20 bucks, depending on what random number the "sale" is that week. This Stephen Grider course is a great follow up after learning the basics of javascript.

HTML is very simple and should be easy to pick up from almost anywhere.

CSS is something I'd recommend doing a course on; it's easy to learn but hard to master, so to speak. You can definitely get by with the basics but it's wacky enough that having a solid foundation will help you overcome the multitude of weirdnesses you'll encounter. There are a few free ones on Youtube that look decent, like this freeCodeCamp one.

Your experience gets you into the interview, you have to build interview skills to pass them. Work on your fundamental data structure & algorithm skills, try either Stephen Grider's Udemy course or Grokking the Coding Interview on Educative to build your skills, then go back to leetcode once you feel confident.

https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/

https://www.udemy.com/course/js-algorithms-and-data-structures-masterclass/

I would also like to add one more course:

https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure

u/sojullihs if you want to ensure success in an interview this is a must! You will not be able to avoid the algo DS interviews, even as a Front End dev!

here it is: https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/

Udemy sends out $10 sale emails every 2 weeks if you're willing to sign up and wait.

What's your goal: backend or ML?

In case of backend:

See - backend roadmap

You'll likely need to learn some framework (Django , Flask, etc..), SQL (#1 #2), Docker, Algorithms, be familiar with Linux systems, git, architect patterns (monolithic, microservices)

I've been preparing for interviews using the following sources:

1. Cracking the Coding Interview
2. The Coding Interview Bootcamp: Algorithms + Data Structures
3. JavaScript & LeetCode | The Ultimate Interview Bootcamp

I want to start tackling a handful of random challenges everyday to prepare.

One thought was to take the problems from these sources and put them in a random number generator. One benefit to this is I could refer to the explanations if I get stuck. Seems like I'm just remembering solutions to a specific set of problems though.

From what i understand LeetCode seems to be the go to for coding challenges these days. When I started becoming a self taught dev, HackerRank was the go too. Is that correct that LeetCode is the go to these days?

At any rate, self taught and my first position of three years kind of fell into my lap and I grew into it. It has been mutually beneficial: I got to learn a lot and grow into the role, while automating most of the company's processes making them exponentially more efficient than they were. But, I feel my growth is stunted by not working on a dev team. My ultimate goal is to work remotely \~100%, which is next to impossible if you haven't worked on a team before, as I understand it. Thus, getting prepared for my first real interviews.

A lot of this will go over your head if you have zero experience, but don't be discouraged:

I can only speak for my own experience, but taking some local community college classes helped a MASSIVE amount, since you begin learning the fundamentals of programming vs. just diving into a programming language. Mind you, some people can and do just jump directly into a book like "Head First Python" and come out the other side with a good understanding of how it works. I am not that type of person lol

The program I enrolled in has changed since then (it was a 2-year certificate program, not AS or BS), but the first language you might learn is Python. It's a very easy language to pick up, and pretty powerful in the right hands. Personally, I find the language fun and easy to write in, but it's not my preference. I went with JavaScript since I enjoy working on the 'backend', then researched what roles/languages/technologies were in demand at the time to get an idea of where I wanted to land. If you're curious, there's always yearly 'state of software development' infographics/interactive sites to see where the industry is. You can generally just search google for 'state of software development [year]' or something similar and you'll see a lot of results saying mostly the same thing :D

• https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/

But all that was after having learned the following in school:

• C
• C++
• C#
• Python
• Data Structures
• super, SUPER important and difficult
• I've seen it called a weed out class, I agree with that. I took it twice.
• Depending on where you interview, you will most likely come across a whiteboard/shared screen technical interview that will have at least one question related to a data structure.
• I've really only been asked to explain and implement data structures for larger companies (FAANG companies mostly)
• Databases
• Also important to understand since that's most likely where you'll store/retrieve data

The thing is, I've never used any of those languages since leaving school. Well, a little bit of Python for a contract, but it was short lived. What you eventually learn in the real world, though, is that a specific language isn't as important as knowing at least the fundamentals of how to think and build like a programmer. You can generally transition the fundamentals into any programming language, you just have to learn the syntax and the way it's used specific to that language.

Lastly, if you're going to go the autodidact route ($10 resume word! Try fitting polyglot somewhere in there too for street cred), I can vouch for this guy:

• Stephen Grider on Udemy
• https://www.udemy.com/course/javascript-beginners-complete-tutorial/
• https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/
• https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-developers-guide-to-mongodb/

I have every single course this guy has put out, and I have been able to increase my own salary and position a great deal because of his courses. He has some basic courses, data structures courses, Backend/Frontend specific courses, all the things you would want to learn about the current technologies being used in production.

Good luck, though! It's a very rewarding road if you're into solving difficult problems, building applications that many people will use, or want to start a company of your own. Don't let the wunderkind kids discourage you either, you'll have years of experience in the real world that you can share with them that will help them grow and that you can transition into a managerial or lead role, if you so desire.

Udemy instructor discords:

• Maximilian schwarzmüller
• Andrei Neagoie
• Colt Steele, Stephen Grider, Jonas Schmedtmann - If you have purchased any of their courses. Not sure if I should be freely posting an invite

CS Career Hub

Reactiflux

Newline.co - Looks like their link is currently down

Leon Noel - 100 Devs - Runs a free bootcamp on twitch and has an accompanying discord server.

I'm sure there are any other discord/slack/keybase groups that you can join, but in general seeking outside help should be your last resort.

P.S. You mentioned that you enjoy front end the most so I'd recommend this:

• Jonas Schmedtmann's HTML/CSS Course
• Scrimba & Kevin Powell's Build a space travel website
• Do 3 projects. For project ideas, look around you or ask friends and family for ideas. If you can't generate project ideas, use the site that Kevin Powell shows in his scrimba course.
• Jonas's JS Course
• Do at least 3 projects. If you can't generate ideas, build a netflix clone, trello clone, google keep etc etc
• DS&A - Stephen Grider's course for a gentle introduction and start practicing on leetcode. RallyCode is a free alternative made by Stephen Grider.
• Start applying for jobs as you are practicing DS&A, and don't stop until you get one.
• Learn React using Max's course while applying for jobs
• Do at least 3 projects React projects while applying for jobs

*Imp: I am not affiliated with Udemy or any of the instructors, I have just created this plan for my friend to get the first job

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• Its \~300 hours of content so it should take around 3-6 months, including practice
• It covers web technologies, in depth JavaScript, Frontend framework like Reactjs & its ecosystem, backend tecnologies like Nodejs & its ecosystem, some other important tools & technologies, TypeScript, interview preparation & resume writing
• It covers at least 4 major projects

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1. Introduction to Web Technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Nodejs, etc) (34 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-web-developer-zero-to-mastery/

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2)  In depth JavaScript (Your main programming language) (52 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/javascript-beginners-complete-tutorial/

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3) Advanced CSS (llayouts & animation) (28 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/advanced-css-and-sass/

4) Everything about - Reactjs & its ecosystem (Frontend Framework) (39 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-react-bootcamp/

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5) Everything about - Nodejs and MongoDB  & their ecosystem (Backend Technologies) (42 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/nodejs-express-mongodb-bootcamp/

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6)  Some other important stuff (Performance, Security, Testing, Other Tools & Technologies) (35 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-junior-to-senior-web-developer-roadmap/

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7) More in-trend programming language based on JavaScript - TypeScript (the current standard) (25 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/typescript-the-complete-developers-guide/

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8) Interview Preparaion (Basic) (13 hours)https://www.udemy.com/course/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/

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9) Interview Preparation (advanced + LeetCode) (22 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/js-algorithms-and-data-structures-masterclass/

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10) Resume writing, LinkedIn, Job Searching, etc (7 hours)

https://www.udemy.com/course/golden-gate-bridge/

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\~ 300 hours of course content

let me know what you think

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ps: This is shared in good faith, there is no affiliation links or I am not going to get a single penny if you take any of the courses :)

This is for those who are comfortable with learning on Udemy

I created a comprehensive all inclusive plan, so thought about sharing it to whom who can really benefit from it