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Cheers,
Sahil

How much DSA to learn?

I strongly believe that you’ll learn much more when you solve actual problems than when reading a lot of
theory. So, I recommend learning some core concepts and moving on to problem-solving as soon as you
can. Here are the core concepts that I learned before I started practicing problems:

1. Performance of Algorithms: Big O.

2. Sorting: Selection sort, Insertion sort, Mergesort, and Quicksort. Differences between Mergesort
and Quicksort. Partition in Quicksort.
3. Recursion: Learn the basic idea. You’ll encounter this again when learning Heaps and BSTs later.
4. Binary Search: Implementation with and without repeating values. Bisect left and Bisect right
implementation. Understand where the pointer ends up depending on the implementation.
5. Stacks & Queues: LIFO vs FIFO, Implementation using linked list or a resizing array. Applications.
6. Heaps & Priority Queues: Adding and removing elements on a Heap and big O. Heapify and
Heapsort. Use case.
7. HashMap & Dictionary: Implementation with Hash Table. Use case.
8. Binary Search Tree (BST): Adding, Removing, Searching an element, and big O.
9. Graphs: Directed vs Undirected, Traversal using BFS and DFS, Shortest path with Dijkstra,
Topological sort.
10. Dynamic Programming: Learn the basic idea. Actual learning will happen only when you solve
some problems yourself.
11. Tries: Implementation and Application.

If you do everything above, you’ll be ready to solve 90% of the problems. That doesn’t mean you’ll be
able to solve all of them. But you can give them a fair shot. Like I said earlier, actual learning will only
happen by solving problems. So, do not get stuck with the theory. Your theoretical knowledge will keep
improving as you practice problems. Good luck!

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