Chapter 65: DSA Syllabus
DSA Syllabus – A Complete, Realistic, and Practical Guide (2025–2026)
Let me explain the DSA syllabus the way a senior who has already placed or a good college teacher would explain it to a serious 2nd/3rd/4th-year student who wants to prepare properly — not just for one company, but to become strong overall.
This is the real syllabus that almost every student who cracks good product-based companies (Google, Amazon, Atlassian, Uber, Flipkart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, startups paying 25–60+ LPA) actually studies.
Two ways people look at DSA Syllabus
- Topic-wise syllabus (what most people ask for)
- Real preparation roadmap with priority & timeline (what actually works)
I will give you both — first the detailed topic-wise syllabus, then a realistic timeline + priority order.
1. Complete Topic-wise DSA Syllabus (2025–2026)
This is the list that covers ~95% of questions asked in placements / off-campus drives / internships.
Phase 1 – Foundation & Basics (1–1.5 months)
- Time & Space Complexity
- Big-O, Big-Ω, Big-Θ
- Best / Average / Worst case
- Amortized analysis (very important)
- Common complexities table (O(1), log n, n, n log n, n², 2ⁿ)
- Arrays – Very High Weightage
- Two Pointers
- Sliding Window (fixed & variable size)
- Prefix Sum / Suffix Sum
- Kadane’s Algorithm (max subarray sum)
- Dutch National Flag (sort 0s,1s,2s)
- Sort array of 0s,1s,2s without extra space
- Rotate array / Juggling algorithm
- Stock Buy Sell (multiple variations)
- Trapping Rain Water (very important)
- Hashing / HashMap / HashSet
- Two Sum / 3Sum / 4Sum
- Longest Consecutive Sequence
- Subarray Sum Equals K
- Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters
- Group Anagrams
- Top K Frequent Elements
- LRU Cache (must do)
- Binary Search (including binary search on answer)
- Search in rotated sorted array
- Find minimum in rotated sorted array
- Search a 2D matrix
- Koko Eating Bananas
- Capacity to Ship Packages
- Aggressive Cows / Painter’s Partition / Book Allocation
- Median of two sorted arrays
Phase 2 – Core Data Structures (2–3 months)
- Linked List
- Reverse (iterative + recursive)
- Middle of linked list (fast-slow pointer)
- Detect & Remove cycle (Floyd’s)
- Merge two sorted lists
- Remove nth from end
- Add two numbers (linked list)
- Palindrome linked list
- LRU Cache (again – very important)
- Stack & Queue
- Valid Parentheses / Next Greater Element / Next Smaller
- Largest Rectangle in Histogram
- Sliding Window Maximum
- Implement Stack using Queue / Queue using Stack
- Min Stack / Design Stack with O(1) min
- Binary Tree
- Traversals (pre/in/post/level – recursive + iterative)
- Height / Diameter / Max Path Sum
- Invert / Mirror tree
- Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA)
- Same Tree / Symmetric Tree
- Zigzag Level Order
- Vertical Order Traversal
- Top / Bottom / Right View
- Binary Search Tree
- Validate BST
- Kth smallest / largest
- Floor / Ceil in BST
- LCA in BST
- Inorder successor / predecessor
- Delete node in BST
- Heap / Priority Queue
- Kth largest / smallest element
- Merge K sorted lists
- Top K frequent elements
- Sliding Window Maximum
- Connect n ropes with minimum cost
Phase 3 – Advanced & High-weightage Topics (2–4 months)
- Graph – BFS & DFS
- Number of Islands
- Rotten Oranges
- Word Ladder
- Course Schedule (topological sort + cycle)
- Clone Graph
- Pacific Atlantic Water Flow
- Bipartite Graph check
- Graph – Shortest Path
- BFS (unweighted)
- Dijkstra (non-negative weights)
- Bellman-Ford (negative weights)
- Floyd-Warshall (all pairs)
- Minimum Spanning Tree
- Kruskal (Union-Find)
- Prim’s (priority queue)
- Greedy
- Activity Selection
- Fractional Knapsack
- Huffman Coding
- Job Sequencing with Deadline
- N meetings in one room
- Jump Game I & II
- Dynamic Programming (most important & most asked)
- 1D DP: Climbing Stairs, House Robber, Coin Change, Partition Equal Subset Sum
- 2D DP: Longest Common Subsequence, Edit Distance, Minimum Path Sum
- DP on grids: Unique Paths, Dungeon Game, Cherry Pickup
- DP on strings: Longest Palindromic Substring, Regular Expression Matching
- DP with bitmasking (very hard but high reward)
- DP on trees (very high frequency now)
- Trie / Prefix Tree
- Implement Trie
- Word Search II
- Design Add and Search Words Data Structure
- Longest Word in Dictionary
- Bit Manipulation
- Single Number / Missing Number
- Reverse Bits
- Power of Two
- Subsets (bitmasking)
- Advanced / Less Frequent but High Reward
- Segment Tree / Fenwick Tree (Binary Indexed Tree)
- Disjoint Set Union (Union-Find with path compression & rank)
- KMP / Z-algorithm (string matching)
- Suffix Array / Suffix Tree (rare but very high reward)
Realistic Timeline & Priority Order (2025–2026)
If you have 4–8 months of serious preparation:
Month 1–2: Arrays, Hashing, Two Pointers, Binary Search, Linked List Month 3: Stack, Queue, Binary Tree traversals & easy-medium problems Month 4: BST, Heap, Graph BFS/DFS, Greedy Month 5–6: Dynamic Programming (most important phase – take time) Month 7+: Revision + company-specific lists + hard graph/DP problems
Summary – What a realistic DSA Syllabus looks like
Core must-have topics (solve 150–250 good problems here)
- Arrays + Hashing
- Two Pointers / Sliding Window
- Binary Search + Binary Search on Answer
- Linked List
- Stack & Queue
- Binary Tree & BST
- Heap / Priority Queue
- Graph (BFS + DFS + Cycle + Shortest Path)
- Greedy
- Dynamic Programming (1D, 2D, state-based)
High-reward extra topics (solve 30–50 problems each if you have time)
- Trie
- Bit Manipulation
- Segment Tree / Fenwick Tree
- Advanced Graph (Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, MST, Topological Sort)
If you want, I can now give you:
- 50–70 most repeated interview problems (with LeetCode links if you want)
- Detailed 3-month / 6-month preparation plan
- One specific topic (e.g. DP, Graph, Binary Search) with 8–10 strong problems
- How to practice (LeetCode vs Codeforces vs GfG vs Striver sheet)
Just tell me what you want next — I’ll make it as detailed and realistic as possible 😊
