DSA Roadmap for Placements

The structured order most placement prep guides converge on: build the fundamentals before jumping into interview-style problems, not the other way around.

9 milestones · ~116 hours total

  1. 1

    Arrays & Strings

    ~15h

    Two-pointer technique, sliding window, prefix sums. This is the foundation almost every later topic builds on.

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  2. 2

    Hashing

    ~8h

    Hash maps/sets for O(1) lookups — turns many O(n²) brute-force solutions into O(n).

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  3. 3

    Linked Lists

    ~10h

    Single/double linked lists, reversal, cycle detection (Floyd's algorithm).

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  4. 4

    Stacks & Queues

    ~10h

    Monotonic stacks, queue-based BFS — shows up constantly in both interviews and real systems.

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  5. 5

    Trees & Binary Search Trees

    ~15h

    Traversals, height/balance problems, BST insert/delete/search.

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  6. 6

    Graphs

    ~20h

    BFS, DFS, topological sort, shortest path (Dijkstra). The highest-leverage topic for System Design-adjacent interview questions.

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  7. 7

    Dynamic Programming

    ~25h

    Start with 1D DP (climbing stairs, house robber) before 2D (knapsack, LCS) — most people skip straight to 2D and get stuck.

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  8. 8

    Greedy & Backtracking

    ~12h

    Interval scheduling, N-Queens-style backtracking — usually the last topic covered before mock interviews.

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  9. 9

    Take a rated DSA assessment

    ~1h

    Once you've covered the above, take a timed rated test to get your first verified DSA rating.

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