My experience participating in TopCoder SRMs (quick algorithm development competitions) has payed off quite a bit when it comes to white board coding style interviews (both as the interviewee and the interviewer). Just thought I'd share a few pointers:
- participating in SRMs is great practice for interviews because you're forced to learn to think clearly while under intense time pressure.
- The TopCoder tutorials are a great resource. In addition to review of useful mathematics, data structures and algorithms they'll give you an introduction into how to participate well. For example time management between the easy, medium and hard problems.
- You have four language choices for SRMs. My preference is C#. I like using Visual Studio because the auto-complete/intellisense comes in handy when you have to write a bit of boilerplate code (like "new Dictionary<int, int>();". I've also used MonoDevelop on OS X. It worked well. iirc almost all problems are solveable using C# except a few where, to my knowledge, C++ was necessary. Read-up on Petr's advice. I believe he's a fan of C#.
- My knowledge of C# isn't particularly deep so don't let learning a new language scare you away. imo you just have to effectively use dynamic arrays (List<T>), hashtables (Dictionary<Tkey, TValue>), static arrays and strings. Also a sorted key-value store like SortedDictionary comes in handy once in a while.
- Last bit of advice: solve lots of problems and have fun! You can access a vast archive of problems from previous competitions and match editorials which usually have decent explanations for the problem solutions.
- participating in SRMs is great practice for interviews because you're forced to learn to think clearly while under intense time pressure.
- The TopCoder tutorials are a great resource. In addition to review of useful mathematics, data structures and algorithms they'll give you an introduction into how to participate well. For example time management between the easy, medium and hard problems.
- You have four language choices for SRMs. My preference is C#. I like using Visual Studio because the auto-complete/intellisense comes in handy when you have to write a bit of boilerplate code (like "new Dictionary<int, int>();". I've also used MonoDevelop on OS X. It worked well. iirc almost all problems are solveable using C# except a few where, to my knowledge, C++ was necessary. Read-up on Petr's advice. I believe he's a fan of C#.
- My knowledge of C# isn't particularly deep so don't let learning a new language scare you away. imo you just have to effectively use dynamic arrays (List<T>), hashtables (Dictionary<Tkey, TValue>), static arrays and strings. Also a sorted key-value store like SortedDictionary comes in handy once in a while.
- Last bit of advice: solve lots of problems and have fun! You can access a vast archive of problems from previous competitions and match editorials which usually have decent explanations for the problem solutions.