Coder Pro, confusing, not worth the price tag

04 Mar 2020

This is more of a first impressions for the learning platform created by two youtubers that I found their advice worthwhile. I thought I’d take a gander on the data structures and algorithm platform that the tech lead and joma tech designed.

Articles

First off the articles they have posted about prepping and etc. are pretty generic, there’s only like 4 of them and there’s nothing in there that you can’t find online. I’d recommend checking out a few books to get a better explanation of BigO (at the bottom of the article), interviewing, and etc.

Videos

The fourth video has an error, where the example that the tech lead gives is wrong due to an error he failed to notice, this would’ve easily been caught with a review of the video itself. Not that it’s a big deal if you pay attention, but I came into the impression that the videos would be instructional, not essentially them proving to us that they can solve programming interview problems. The material doesn’t evolve from here’s the problem statement, let me explain to you some of the basics, and here’s how to solve it. This content is not worth the price of admission, videos can be found on youtube (free), that do an equivalent job of explaining and going through a problem. They do talk about some permutations of the problem and sprinkle in personal anecdotes, but with a blantant error, not sure if they have my confidence.

Code

The code is clean and succinct, nothing to complain, but for a learning tool, some comments would be helpful. I guess watching through the video and stopping it to understand the sections of the code work, but in comparison to the incredible learning tools in Khan Academy, I’m not sure where the money is going. If I wanted good source code on the problems, I would look at the source code of the standard library or look at git hub projects.

Alternatives

• Algorithms by Jeff Erickson, free online, but also a cheap textbook that is no-nonsense, focused first on techniques and getting you a toolkit to solve problems.
• Algorithms Illuminated, with free videos, doesn’t hold your hand and forces you persevere, the ideas thrown around in the book come at a fast pace, so be sure to spend time understanding each section before moving on.
• Cracking the Coding Interview, for interview advice, motivation, pseudocode, and some classic interview problems.
• LeetCode provides free articles and practice problems centered around the fundamentals, they don’t waste your time and don’t cost money. Premium for additional content.
• Interview Cake they have a pretty enticing guarantee, more advice on problem solving, practicing, and interviewing. Paid content is for questions. I can’t speak to them, but I will once I decide to take the plunge.
• Binary Search a google doc for solving programming problems.
• Interviewing.io looks promising, will use once I’m ready to start interviewing.
• Pramp alternative to Interviewing.io?