[khangsile]

Some advice from when I studied for these no more than two months ago: 1. Cracking the Code - get ahold of it and read through it. It 'll give you all the topics that you should study through and some tricks that are helpful in implementations. You'll still need to use other resources in order to know the topics in depth, like I don't think it goes too in depth into dynamic programming, but the book does have a large amount of questions and solutions. 2. oj.leetcode.com - This is just a website kind of like how interviewstreet was, and something around 180 problems that are interview style problems. You should be fine if you can do the almost all of the medium or easy level problems and maybe some of the hard ones. For these, I'd definitely get out a notebook and write out solutions and then throw type them up, to get a feel for how whiteboarding is going to be. 3. If you've got friends who are in the same position, actual mock interviews in person are an enormous help. I had a couple friends get together, and one of us would do one problem at a time while the rest evaluated them - basically acted like the interviewer.

With regards to timeline, I think I started preparing for my first phone interview a week early. The first couple of days were definitely slow, but with 3 days left, I studied for a couple hours each day before. For my first onsite, I found out about oj.leetcode.com about two weeks before and just did those problems almost non-stop for the two weeks leading up. Five days before the onsite, I rounded up some friends and we started doing whiteboard problems for a couple hours each day.

I guess preparation time varies by person. I did a little bit of competitive programming before this, so I would say I had a little bit of a head start. However, before this, I probably couldn't program a binary search off the top of my head, or approach dynamic programming problems, but now, I can probably handle a decent amount of algorithmimc interview problems. I can't say I'm pro, but I'm apparently good enough.