Memorization: solving coding problems… without learning how to solve them

Contrary to a popular belief, passing the standard 'Algorithms 101' course offered by most universities will not prepare you for a coding interview! Indeed, since many 'Algorithms 101' courses do not require real coding, even graduates of top computer science programs need to independently prepare for coding interviews.

This process is facilitated by companies that offer you many coding problems. This time-consuming path often amounts to the memorization of solutions to hundreds of problems rather than the ability to solve a new problem that you might find at your next coding interview.

Active learning versus memorization

This book offers a different approach by teaching ideas that help you solve any interview problem from scratch. As professors who have taught thousands of students at our universities (and over a million students at Coursera and edX), we understand the algorithmic ideas that will best prepare you to solve a spectrum of problems you may encounter in your next interview.

We thus carefully selected just 30 basic problems that illustrate these ideas. We don't show you the solutions to these problems right away — instead, we developed interactive puzzles (that you can solve on your smartphone!) and a series of hints to help you to come up with these ideas on your own. This active learning approach is far superior because the best way to solve a spectrum of problems (based on the same idea) is to "re-discover" this idea rather than "memorizing" the solutions to all these problems.

A fast "30+30" approach for preparing for a coding interview

Even though there are thousands of different interview problems, nearly all of them can be solved using relatively few algorithmic ideas that are illustrated by our thirty basic problems. By learning each of these ideas, you will be able to solve the entire spectrum of problems based on a specific idea.

After solving our basic problems, we offer you thirty common interview questions so that you can check whether you can apply the ideas that you've learned for solving them on your own. Once you've solved all of them yourself, you're ready for your next interview! And you can continue practicing other problems but this time really SOLVING them rather than MEMORIZING their solutions. That is why we believe that our "30+30" approach is superior and more time-efficient than a popular "solving problems without learning how to solve them" approach.

Online courses

Computer Science

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