DP Mastery (1st Year Edition)

If you're in your 1st year and want to become genuinely strong at Dynamic Programming, this sheet is built for you.

Most DP sheets give you hundreds of problems and leave you wondering:

Where do I start? What should I solve next? Which problems actually matter for interviews? And when am I ready to move to harder DP?

I wanted to solve exactly that.

After going through my own interview experiences with companies such as Google, Oracle, Cisco, InfoEdge, Amazon and others, along with studying interview experiences shared online and experiences from my friends, I curated this roadmap around the DP patterns that actually matter.

This is not a random collection of 200+ questions.

The problems are arranged progressively so that a first-year student can start with simple problems, slowly build intuition, and eventually go deep into advanced Dynamic Programming.

What you'll cover

From:

Recursion → 1D DP → Take/Not-Take → Knapsack → Coin Change → Grid DP → String/LCS → LIS → Stocks → Interval DP → Game DP → Graph/DAG DP → Tree DP → Bitmask DP → Digit DP

and eventually into:

DP + Data Structures → Advanced Optimizations → SOS DP → Profile DP → Competitive Programming level DP

The sheet also tells you where to stop

Not everyone needs the same level of DP preparation.

Problems are categorized so you can follow the path relevant to your goal:

Interview Core

High-return DP patterns you should know for software engineering interviews.

OA+ / Strong Interview

For tougher Online Assessments and companies that ask deeper DP questions.

CP / DP Mastery

Advanced problems and techniques for students who want serious competitive programming depth.

Problems are also marked based on their purpose:

Must Solve • Reinforcement • Advanced • Optional

So you know why a problem is present, instead of blindly solving everything.

Who is this for?

This edition is specifically designed for 1st-year students.

Because you have more time, the roadmap does not rush you through 40 “important” questions. It gives you a gradual learning curve with enough reinforcement to develop intuition, and then expands into both depth and breadth.

You can stop at Interview Core if placements are your goal, continue to OA+ for stronger preparation, or complete the entire roadmap if you want to master DP.

One roadmap. Start from zero. Keep using it as you grow.