The Recipe Book
If Data Structures are the ingredients — the way we store and organize data — then Algorithms are the recipes: the step-by-step procedures we follow to process that data and produce a result.
Knowing you have an array is useless if you don't know how to search through it efficiently or sort it correctly. A chef with a pantry full of ingredients but no recipes produces chaos. An engineer with data but no algorithms produces slow, broken software.
This module covers the Big Four algorithmic concepts that form the backbone of almost every coding interview question you will encounter:
- Binary Search — finding things fast in sorted data
- Sorting — understanding how data gets ordered and at what cost
- Recursion — solving problems by breaking them into smaller copies of themselves
- Dynamic Programming — recursion made efficient through caching
Each concept builds on the previous one. Recursion is the foundation of both Merge Sort and Dynamic Programming. Understanding sorting unlocks Binary Search. By the end, these four ideas will feel like a single unified toolkit.