The DSA Roadmap

Start here regardless of experience level — these build the array-manipulation muscle memory (pointers, swaps, partitions) that every later phase leans on.

The monotonic-stack and sliding-window patterns show up constantly in interviews — learn them once here, recognize them everywhere after.

Pointer manipulation without an index to lean on — a different kind of careful than arrays. LRU Cache at the end combines it with a hashmap (its primary home is Linked Lists — see the combo tag for the full breakdown), a very common interview question.

Recursion finally pays off visually — traversals first to build intuition, then BST and heap operations that depend on them.

Short phase, but an important shift in thinking: explore a choice, undo it if it fails, try the next one.

BFS/DFS are the foundation nearly every graph algorithm builds on, including the shortest-path and spanning-tree algorithms that follow.

The phase most people find hardest — start with Fibonacci and Coin Change to see the recurrence-to-table pattern before the 2D problems (LCS, Edit Distance, Unique Paths).

The finish line — proving a locally-best choice leads to a globally-best answer, without DP's exhaustive bookkeeping.