You would span that prep over more than one month if you're still in college. Then if you get to do some other interview later in your career, going over those

You would span that prep over more than one month if you're still in college. Then if you get to do some other interview later in your career, going over those same materials won't take you as long. so the up-front cost is paid only "once". >I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. The problem here is that your existing day-to-day skills are very different from what is being asked at the interview. See every Hacker news discussions about how broken interviews are. The author's job at Amazon is not going to be "how would you find the common ancestor of these 2 nodes in a toy struct Node{ int value; Node* left; Node* right ; }; binary tree" For the brushup on algorithms and data structures I would add this one, missing from many books: Implement a simple queue based BFS/DFS algorithm on a toy graph (struct Vertex{ T data; std::vector<Vertex*> neighbors; }; use of basic data structures like std::queue and std::unordered_map/set allowed). Being able to code a sssp on an unweighted graph should be a doable objective. PS: Another resource I enjoy that the author didn't mention : https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets-Landing/dp/1118261364 https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secret...