11 BEST Coding Interview Preparation Courses Compared (2023)

Best Immersive

interview

kickstart

Interview Kickstart is a comprehensive  2-4mo interview prep online bootcamp.

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Best for Soft Skills

accelerate your software developer career

Accelerate your S.D. career has the best advice on personal presentation skills.

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Best for Budget

master the coding Interview – udemy

Master the Coding Interview has hours of video lectures at an affordable price.

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Best Overall

algo

expert

Algo Expert offers curated questions, videos and IDE at a good price point.

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The 3 categories of courses

• All-inclusive interview prep courses. These teach you how to solve both coding and behavioral questions – the complete package.
• Soft skills courses. Focusing most on the interpersonal and meta-skills you need to answer questions well and win over your employer. 
• Pure coding questions courses. They’re providing detailed problem-solving steps and a live coding environment for effective interview preparation.

Criteria for evaluating the courses

• How well they instruct algorithms & data structures. You should get so much practice in your coding course that you’ve got these topics down pat. They should be making you so good at DSA that you’ll blaze through any question. 
• Do they select the best interview questions? You don’t want to grind out 1000s of mildly related problems. You don’t need a course for that. What you want is to only learn what’s most relevant to your upcoming interview.
• Whether they teach problem-solving. With the right approach, you need not fear any challenge thrown at you during the interview. A great coding interview prep course teaches you how to take apart any problem – and solve it in the most efficient way.
• Value for your investment. Diving into the skills for far-out future interviews? Then it’s fine to start with a budget option to get your feet wet. Maximize your chances at an upcoming interview? Invest more in an in-depth course, for a big potential payoff.

Complete Interview Prep Courses – Coding & behavioral

There are a courses you can use to prepare for your coding interview out there that have it all: 

• They’re turning you into a master at solving coding questions. 
• They’re revealing the right approach to problem-solving. 
• Plus they’re preparing you for the behavioral part of the interview, instilling in you the proper mindset for success , and teaching you those crucial, often-neglected soft skills. 

So you’ll go into your coding interview with confidence & impress the recruiters.

These are the best complete courses out there:

1. AlgoExpert

• Best for: If you’re looking for a more focused alternative to LeetCode with good video explanations.
• Unique features: They’ve added systems design & behavioral courses to their bundle. Mock interviews with other users.
• Price: $79 for the complete Tech Interview Bundle.

Your instructors at AlgoExpert

• Clement Mihailescu, founder of AlgoExpert, an Ex-Facebook Software Engineer with a 400k strong YouTube Channel. 
• Tim Ruscica aka Tech with Tim (over 1 million subscribers on YouTube), Ex-Software Engineering Intern at Microsoft. 
• Ex-Amazon and Facebook Software Engineers for the Front-End & Machine Learning courses.

Course content

With AlgoExpert, you’ll learn to solve hand-picked, relevant coding interview questions inside their platform.

• For each problem, you get a detailed video explaining the best way to solve it. 
• There’s a module with coding interview tips, and you get curated practice tests to assess whether your interview preparation has been successful.
• You can sharpen your skills in a live environment by doing mock interviews with other users on the platform.
• The tech interview bundle also features a whole course on systems design, plus 15 lessons on behavioral interview prep.

Pros & Cons

• Curated questions so you only learn what’s relevant to your interview.
• Great value for the modest price.
• The behavioral section could be more comprehensive.

2. Interview Kickstart

• Best for: If you want the immersive bootcamp experience.
• Unique features: 7-18 week cohort-based instruction. A 6-month support period where they help you polish your resume & more.
• Price: $6200

We’ve also taken a more in-depth look at Interview Kickstart’s program if you’d like to know all the details.

Your instructors at Interview Kickstart

Your instructors at Interview Kickstart will be tech leads and hiring managers conducting coding / behavioral interviews at FAANG and Tier-1 companies.

Course content

The bootcamp will have you master concepts and solve problems in data structures, algorithms and systems design. On top of that they’ll teach you role-specific skills as well as soft (behavioral) skills and give career advice.

Here’s how your weekly schedule will look with Interview Kickstart:

📆Friday: You’ll receive the pre-class study material on foundational concepts📆Sunday: Live class on the week’s topic with a FAANG+ instructor📆Mon-Wed: Solve the curated question sets and run test cases📆Thursday: Simulated tests and instructor-led calibrated discussions

Pros & Cons

• You’ll go into the most depth with the Interview Kickstart online coding bootcamp – as it stretches over 2-4 months.
• You’ll be most likely to follow through with all the lessons because the instructor sessions are scheduled, and you’re expected to participate in the tests and assignments.
• You’ll invest the most money into Interview Kickstart compared to all other online coding preparation courses.

3. Interview Cake

• Best for: If you’re looking to get helpful hints while solving coding questions, just like you would in a real interview.
• Unique features: Helpful, progressive hints for solving questions. 100-day ‘no questions asked’ refund policy. Read all about Interview Cake here.
• Price: $149 for 3 months, $249 for 12 months

Your instructors at Interview Cake

Parker Phinney started Interview Cake in 2013 after helping his friend prepare for a round of coding interviews and her getting a job at Facebook. 

He refined his approach by teaching students at coding bootcamps in San Francisco.

Course content

First, you’ll get a high-level instruction in algorithmic thinking — which you can then apply to the rest of the course.

The next 8 modules have you master all types of algorithms & data structures.

Then you have 4 modules not all other courses offer you, teaching you:

• System design
• General programming
• Bit manipulation
• Combinatorics & math
• JavaScript-specific questions
• Coding interview tips

Pros & Cons

• Good instruction of technical questions you need to prepare for coding interviews.
• Easy to pick & choose specific topics to drill. 50 hours of practice questions & readings.
• Plus a small section on soft skills and mental hacks.
• Only written instructions and explanations, no video content.

4. Grokking the Coding Interview (educative.io)

• Best for: If you want to master problem-solving skills.
• Unique features: Best at coming up with patterns for solving questions. You can access over 300 other courses (for example Grokking the Behavioral Interview) on the platform. Upon completing the course, you’ll earn a certificate.
• Price: $19.99 per month

Your instructors at educative.io

Educative was launched in 2015 by three software engineers working at eBay, Microsoft and Facebook.

Course content

Your instructors at educative.io have come up with 16 patterns for coding interview questions. This allows you to solve any problem once you know which pattern it belongs to. Every problem in the course is solved in Java, Python, C++ and JavaScript.It’ll take you around 50 hours to complete the interview prep course:182 lessons, 125 challenges, 1043 playgrounds, 217 illustrations.

Pros & Cons

• Access to different courses like systems design and most coding languages.
• A code compiler is included.
• You get a certificate after you’ve completed the course.
• Great if you like reading. But no videos.

Behavioral (Soft Skills) Prep Courses for Programming Interview

These courses dive deep into some of the intangibles of getting a great software engineer job.

You need to master soft skills to properly market yourself and maximize your value on the job market. 

If you apply these lessons, you can outshine the other (even the more skilled) candidates.

These are the best behavioral and soft skills courses to prep your coding interview:

1. Accelerate Your Software Developer Career: Digital Toolkit by Simple Programmer

• Best for: Gaining the right mindset for coding interviews & learning how to present yourself in the best way possible. Maximizing your market value as a programmer.
• Unique features: A course module on how to “dress to impress” at your interview. The “Job Hunting Plan” module & the “Salary Negotiation” module.
• Price: $175

Your instructor

I’m John Sonmez, the founder of Simple Programmer. In Accelerate Your Software Developer Career, you’ll get the strategies I’ve used to work my way up to lucrative senior development positions. You’ll benefit from knowledge I’ve used to create 55 PluralSight training courses on topics ranging from Java to iOS to GoLang, and to write the best-selling book, Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual. The “soft skills” tactics you’ll learn have led me to become a speaker at international developer conferences and consult with major corporations like Verizon.

Course content

• The “hard” questions: Language-specific questions, algorithm & data structure questions, design pattern questions, object oriented questions, SQL & database questions. Video explanations on how to solve each.
• The “how” of solving coding interview questions. If you have the right process, you can crack most questions, no matter their content. Because you know how to approach and solve the problem presented.
• The “soft” questions: Behavioral questions, plus how to prepare for the best chance to ace the interview.