In this course, you have learned a range of concepts and skills as you prepare for a coding interview. Let's take a few moments to recap the key topics that you learned about. In the first module, you started by discovering what a coding interview is, what it can consist of and the types of coding interview that you might encounter. Your first lesson focused on the technical coding interview, primarily to determine that you are technically capable of the roles responsibilities. You learned about the steps that you must keep in mind when this interview is conducted. You were taught that using the appropriate tools is always important and that you have to keep time constraints in mind. You also explored how you can prepare yourself for a coding interview and the importance of first impressions, including a focus on communication such as explaining your thought processes and handling mistakes. You learned about the star method and how to use it to your benefit when communicating with interviewers. You also learned about how to work with pseudocode to demonstrate how you might reach a solution. Some important tips for practical solution design and how to test your solutions. In the next lesson, you've got an introduction to computer science. Starting with an overview of binary, where you learned about the difference between base 10 and base 2. You then discovered positional notation, the use of the position of the number to denote a progressive increase in value. You then moved on to explore key components of computer memory and how it works. You should know by now that to better understand the various layers of memory and should be able to describe the differences. You learned about the transfer rate or the speed at which a computer can transfer memory into the cache for processing. You then moved on to time complexity, where you learned how to evaluate time efficiency or gauge performance by the time taken to complete a task. You discovered Big-O notation, which is a metric for determining an algorithms efficiency. You explored space complexity, which is essentially the space required to compute a result. And that any decisions around space complexity are not just based on the speed of an algorithm, but also on how much memory capacity a given solution will use. There will always be a choice to prioritize speed or compactness. In the second module, you learned about data structures. This ranged from basic data structures like strings, Boolean or arrays, to more advanced data structures like collections, graphs and heaps, and how each one comes with certain benefits and limitations. You explored all the types of data structures and how they are classified into two main branches, linear and nonlinear. Next, you were introduced to stacks and queues, abstract data structures that both have specific characteristics around how elements are added and removed. When you visited queue, you learned that a queue is very similar to a stack in that it tends to have the same methods. It can create, insert, remove and check the state of the queue. Unlike a stack, a queue works on a first in first out or FIFO basis. Finally, you found out that trees are a powerful data structure that give you great flexibility in adding and searching values. Following this, you went on to examine some advanced data structures namely hash tables, heaps and graphs. Next, you explored heaps. You discovered how heaps can be used to organize elements from least to most important and how, by limiting the functionality of heaps, productivity can be increased. Finally, you examined graphs. This structure illustration is a graph that is made up of nodes to denote destinations and edges that show how each note relates to another. The presence of values between the nodes mean that this is a weighted graph, there are no arrows present, which means that it is an undirected graph. In contrast to a directed graph, an undirected graph has no order of precedence. And you learned that a connection in a directed graph is considered weakly connected if the edge is only one way. However, if there are two connections going either way between two nodes, then it is said to be strongly connected. In the third module, you had an introduction to algorithms including the types of algorithms available to you and how best to work with them to sort and search your data. You started by exploring sorting algorithms and how working with sorted data or having the ability to sort your own data can result in significant time savings. You discovered why sorting is important and explored the three main methods for sorting, selection, insertion and quick sort. Next, you went on to discover searching algorithms and how each type provides its own framework for problem solving. You explored two core approaches to searching, linear and binary. Linear searches progress through every item in a given data structure until a specific item is found, whereas binary search is half the search space at each iteration. You also gained insight into time and space complexity in both searching and sorting algorithms. You then moved on to the final lesson where you were introduced to working with algorithms. Here, you learned about different approaches to working with algorithms. First, you explored the divide and conquer paradigm. You learned that in the divide step, the input is split into smaller segments and processed individually. In the conquer step, every task associated with a given segment is solved and the optional last step combine is combining all the solved segments. Next, you explored another important algorithmic approach. Recursion, recursion is when a function calls itself with a smaller instance of a problem repeatedly until some exit condition is met. And you learned that there are three requirements for implementing a recursive solution, namely, the base case, the diminishing structure and the recursive call. You would then introduced to dynamic programming, which is a programming paradigm that promotes solving problems by breaking them into smaller problems. And you examined the process involved to compute a dynamic programming solution. Essentially, this can be outlined as first determining the objective function. That is the description of what the optimum outcome is to be. Next, breaking the problem into smaller steps and then deciding which approach you would like to apply to achieve your desired outcome. Finally, you learned about greedy algorithms in comparison to the dynamic programming approach. A greedy approach would look at the list of solutions and implement a local optimization. Usually, the current most rewarding option is chosen and you looked at an example of how a greedy algorithm approach could be implemented to reach a solution. While the overhead for a greedy algorithm is low and coding a solution is quite straightforward, it will not always guarantee that the best option is returned. So, there is a trade off when choosing a greedy approach over a dynamic one. Well done, you have covered so many important concepts and approaches throughout this course. It is a real achievement, but it should also serve to prepare you for any potential coding interviews that you may go on to attend. All you have left to do is to take the final course quiz before wrapping up the course. Good luck.
