How to use LeetCode effectively

what's ugly coders today we're gonna be talking about Oh [Music] all right okay you guys aren't gonna take me seriously give me a sec okay need people to respect me on this channel as an intellectual this is how I have to dress to impress you guys so be it another we have that situation situated so where was I welcome Lee coders one and all today I want to talk about the strategies for utilizing Lee code in the best way possible in my opinion if you're unfamiliar with Lee code it's just an algorithm platform maybe you've heard of hacker rank it's just where you do algorithms it's like one of the main things for technical interviews and it's basically what my channel is based off of most for the most part so let's just go to the platform let's check it out first and like see what's going on so here we are we're at Lee code comm and these are all of the challenges it's all algorithms and data structures based problems you go to the problem and you can just solve it there's thousands like how many are there there's one 1263 right now but almost all of them are algorithms data structures there's some sequel ones but for the most part it's algorithms data structures and yeah there's a lot of really good problems on this website I think you can like pretty much pass your technical interviews if you just stuck to doing this website only it's honestly a lifesaver that someone has made this platform I love this platform now some of the problems are locked so you would have to buy a premium membership to get that and I have another video explaining on whether that's worth it or not but for the most part there's a ton of unlock problems platforms awesome so a first glance we're just looking at this we have a title we have the problem number and then we have you know things like acceptance rate difficulty frequencies locked for premium but difficulty is a super important thing so I guess I'll talk about that first difficulty wise I think that when you're first starting out with lis code go after easy problems do maybe 20 or 30 and ease your way into the medium problems once you're comfortable it took me about a month to get comfortable by the way you can move on to these medium problems and throughout your studies for technical interviews I would say stick mainly the medium problems because easy problems you can solve a huge quantity of them every day but they don't like teach you all of the fundamentals you need to know and hard problems you're gonna be solving one a day which is like that's too much time being consumed by problem but they do teach you a lot medium gives you like bang for your buck you're solving you can solve a decent amount and you're learning you're getting the content there so I'd say start out easy work your way into medium problems and stick right in the pocket of doing medium problems for the most part now there's some edge cases to this though because I've seen easy problems that should be ranked medium I've seen medium ones that should be hard I've seen hard ones that should be medium for the most part the rankings are pretty accurate but there is a few hard problems I would recommend doing there's a few easy problems I'd recommend doing I really I have a technical interview study guide on my patreon where I'm putting together like a list of all of the problems I think you should do so maybe check that out if you want not gonna sit here and go through every problem but but the way you can kind of find the best problems to do first of all is there are like some really good filters here so for example there's these lists right top 100 late liked questions so the questions with the most likes generally are gonna be the best questions to do and they're really good like they have a good content you're learning a lot from them so check out some of these top 100 like questions another great list top one on top interview questions I mean it's pretty obvious like use these filters like do these ones first but I'm saying work your way and what the easy ones when you're just starting now there's been some people commenting on my videos saying like it's so difficult I struggle so much I don't think I'm ever gonna even I can't even solve easy problems I mean there's like I don't know if you're getting into it a little bit early maybe you're trying to do it and you don't even know a programming language I'd say if you don't understand a programming language fully you have to know that before you're getting into algorithms and data structures like not every specific intricate detail about it but like generally you kind of have to understand programming once you're comfortable you can work your way in start with those really easy ones like look for high acceptance rate easy ones that are like basically just looping through and doing like some basic counting and then like I promise like I was there at one point like I was sitting there and I was spending five hours per problem like the first month was really a lot of struggling for me and it's really frustrating but you kind of just something you have to kind of sit through and understand and figure it out and then eventually you can kind of see these patterns forming you can understand to categorize problems and you can kind of up take things from problems you've solved and use them into more advanced problems really what you're gonna see is that a lot of these medium problems have basically culminations of easy problems put together like like one medium problem could consist of doing a method you used in one easy problem and a method using another one and they kind of combined problems and then hard problems or combinations of medium problems it's kind of just you know building blocks building blocks just like everything else in life it's really just about practice don't give up on yourself just because you don't understand things like it takes up some time and it takes effort one other thing I guess I could say is I would recommend starting with easier data structures and building up like that - like what is them what are the most easy data structures arrays right you use those with everything what are the hardest data structures heaps tries like more advanced stuff like build your way up like arrays stacks queues trees you know like do it in like a linear fashion work your way up from the beginning and go to harder material same with algorithms right same with like basic things okay and let's look at a problem here so this one is called 3sum so basically what they do is they give you the like ratio so you could like the problem you are given a dis problem description you're given some test cases you're given some hints down here which is really nice also in bado right now I have this debugger that they're implementing soon you guys might not have it I signed up for this beta and I just got access yesterday but this is really nice because it's going to be a little real time coding editor so you see you can kind of test this out in real time like the code it just runs and it'll throw your errors and give you debugging output like right away instead of having to hit that run code thing and wait five seconds for the you know look through the output and stuff like that this is gonna be really helpful and if you're struggling to answer a problem like if you're reading through the problem and you're spending like thirty minutes to an hour on a problem don't waste hours and hours trying to solve these problems like I'd say just look at the solution and try and understand the solution one thing that you're gonna be able to do now is you're gonna be able to look at some of these solutions you're going to be able to paste it into your editor and what I've been doing is I've been printing variables and seeing how the like solution works that's what helping helps me understand is like outputting kind of like how you would in software engineering like do some print statements print the variables in the loops and see like what's going on when you run it this debugger is really going to help I think a lot in the future with printing and seeing what's gonna happen throughout the code this all of us understand the solutions a lot better and come up with better solutions so I think lead coats only gonna be getting better I really love it I'm really excited about this debugging feature and guys just don't spend hours and hours trying to solve these problems look at the solutions you'll be able to learn from them and you'll be able to carry them over into similar problems because there's so many similar problems you're gonna run into the same thing so yeah I'm really excited about all these new things excited about linked codes growth is a platform in this debugger I think is really gonna help everyone out and yeah I think you guys just got to stick with it you're gonna be fine if you practice I know that you'll get good so and watch my videos and like and subscribe I guess that's a good point to end it so let me know if you think I'm missing anything in this video and good luck to everyone who's going through the interview grind alright see you guys in the next one I'm going back into my Will Ferrell shirt now alright goodbye

Channel: Nick White

Views: 253,211

Rating: 4.8854156 out of 5

Keywords: leetcode, coding, algorithms, data structures, technical interview, computer science, coding interview, hackerrank, how to use leetcode, How to use LeetCode effectively, kevin naughton jr, back to back swe, nick white, algorithm, data structure, coding questions, code, program, programming, programming interview, programmer, developer, software engineering, software development, software developer

Id: CltYi33y0ls

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 20 2019