Ask HN: good, quick algorithms course to prepare for big tech interviews?

I'm going to be interviewing for a professional work experience year as a university student (engineering) at several big software tech companies. I studied mainly electrical engineering, and it's been a while since my computer science algorithms days. I've still coded pretty much every week, but I can't remember specific stuff like merge sort, binary heaps, etc (plus I don't know what I need to know).

I hear algorithms-type questions come up a lot, so I would like to prepare really well as quickly as I can. What good sources would HN recommend?

Thanks.

For out of college candidates you have two dominant types of problems: algorithms, and data-structures.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/170/ http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,63...

In terms of ways to exercise your knowledge, go through old ACM Programming Competition questions too. They'll most likely be harder than you'll get in a phone or whiteboard, but it gets you in the mode of thinking for it (finding the fastest solution, smallest space, etc...):

http://www.ntnu.edu.tw/acm/ProblemSetArchive.html

Also, poke around GlassDoor (http://www.glassdoor.com). There's "interview reviews" up on there, and for larger companies, a lot of times there's just straight up questions and answers. So that can give you a good feel of who's asking what level of stuff. It's somewhat grain of saltish since a lot of the reviews seem to end with "no offer given", but it's still interesting.

If you can't remember merge sort, quick sort or heaps, a easy starting point is wikipedia, and then code them up in your language of choice. It shouldn't take long, and you'll learn it better by doing than by reading about it.

I like Cracking the Coding Interview: http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Fourth-Progr...

And The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena: http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Fourth-Progr...