The 3 categories of courses
Criteria for evaluating the courses
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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.
Plus: The best way to hunt for jobs, present yourself as a programmer, and negotiate your salary.
Pros & Cons
Your instructor
Jeremy Schifeling is an ex-kindergarten teacher who ‘broke into tech’ (hence the name of his company Break Into Tech) and ended up working at Apple and LinkedIn. Now he’s teaching you how to get a job in Big Tech, too, even if you’re coming from a non-technical background.
Course content
‘Land Your First Tech Job’ is 100% focused on the career and behavioral skills needed to get a job, not on the coding questions themselves. The interview prep course teaches you:
- Resume skills
- Interview skills
- Confidence
- Behavioral questions
Pros & Cons
PURE Coding Courses for Interview Preparation
Got your soft skills and behavioral answers already dialed in?
Just want to laser-focus on perfecting your coding questions approach?
Then these pure coding courses are your best interview prep resource.
Your instructors at Udemy
Andrew Neagoie is the founder of Zero to Mastery. A self-taught programmer, he’s been working as a senior software developer in Silicon Valley and Toronto for many years. He has taught many people to get jobs at FAANG companies.
Yihua Zhang, also a self-taught developer, has been working for Big Tech in Toronto for many years, and been a coding instructor for over ten.
Course content
This is how explanations are structured in Master the Coding Interview: Your instructor clarifies what the question is aiming at. He details your best approach to solving it. Then he goes through the multiple steps of the solution clearly with clear instructions.
Here’s all that the course addresses:
- Arrays questions
- Strings questions
- Linked list questions
- Stacks questions
- Trees questions
- Graphs questions
- Algorithm questions
Pros & Cons
Your instructor at Interview Camp
Harsh Goel is a Software Engineer who has worked at Google and Pinterest in San Francisco. He has received many tech job offers, including from Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft.
Course content
The Interview Camp coding interview preparation course packs over 60 hours of video content. You’ll learn algorithms, data structures and systems design from the ground up.
➡️Each week, you get a live group video session that lasts 90 minutes. It starts with a deep dive on a system designs topic. After that you can get any question you’d like answered. The calls are recorded for you to review later.
Pros & Cons
3. AlgoMonster
Your instructors at AlgoExpert
AlgoMonster was founded by Google engineers who were fed up with having so sift through 1000s of problems on platforms like LeetCode to try and prepare yourself for your coding interview.
Course content
Inside the course, you’ll learn the five basic patterns all coding interview questions are based on. That way you have a high-level view of any problem presented – and you’re able to pick the most efficient solution.
The interactive environment helps you actually learn, by giving you constant feedback on your inputs, not having you just passively watch videos.
Pros & Cons
4. Skilled.Dev
Your instructor at Skilled.Dev
Trey Huffine is a software engineer with years of experience working for Silicon Valley startups. He even got a job offer after interviewing with Google. Since 2019 he has been building career tools for SWEs at gitconnected.com, and teaching coding interviews on Skilled.Dev.
Course content
Solution videos: Trey walks you through every coding solution in a 10-15 minute video.
Guided articles: First you’re getting a written explanation of the problem. Then you can view a detailed written & illustrated breakdown of each step for solving it. At each step you have the opportunity to have your code answer validated by the platform.
Live code execution: You can tackle whole interview questions right there inside the built-in coding environment. At any point, you can choose to look at hints or take a glance at the solution provided.
Pros & Cons
5. CodeCademy
Your instructors at CodeCademy
CodeCademy - an established code-learning platform - employs dozens of experienced software engineers.
Course content
The ‘Pass the Technical Interview’ courses instruct you in advanced coding skills in your language of choice. It is 8 weeks in proposed length.
After that, you’ll learn all elements of the coding interview – with lessons on all aspects of data structures & algorithms.
The focus is on writing clean, professional-level code.
Included are lessons, articles, projects, quizzes and videos to prepare you for your coding interview.
It even has a short section on interviewing tips and tricks.
Pros & Cons