I am a 29 year old self-taught developer. Like you, my experience lies primarily with ruby and javascript (though I have developed a habit of doing project eule

I am a 29 year old self-taught developer. Like you, my experience lies primarily with ruby and javascript (though I have developed a habit of doing project euler problems in clojure). 1) Practice. Glassdoor is an indispensable tool for this. For example, if you're interviewing at Facebook, you can basically compile a list of the algorithms that have been asked and practice that set, until you have it completely down. Rehearse in front of peers, friends, pets, inanimate objects, whatever. You can likely find a working solution to any of these problems on stack. 2) Yeah, they are pretty important, but probably not to the degree that they are emphasized in the interview process. For example, a common theme in algorithm problems is finding a solution which works within a certain time complexity (linear, log, etc). In practice this often reduces to the following situation: You are doing some calculation which involves a bunch of nested for-loops. Eliminate one of the inner for-loops.. or something to that effect. So yeah, it's important practically. It becomes more important when you're dealing with millions of records and terabytes of data, and an extra for-loop could mean that your program effectively runs a month longer than it should. 3. The only online course I took for CS stuff was a MIT open-courseware class on Algorithms. Additionally, I highly recommend the book "Algorithms" by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.