Python Coding Interviews: Tips & Best Practices

Python Coding Interviews: Tips & Best Practices

English | MP4 | AVC 1920×1080 | AAC 48KHz 2ch | 2h 21m | 700 MB

You’ve made it past the phone call with the recruiter, and now it’s time to show that you know how to solve problems with actual code. Whether it’s a HackerRank exercise, a take-home assignment, or an onsite whiteboard interview, this is your moment to prove your coding interview skills.

But interviews aren’t just about solving problems: they’re also about showing that you can write clean production code. This means that you have a deep knowledge of Python’s built-in functionality and libraries. This knowledge shows companies that you can move quickly and won’t duplicate functionality that comes with the language just because you don’t know it exists.

At Real Python, we’ve put our heads together and discussed what tools we’re always impressed to see in coding interviews. This course will walk you through the best of that functionality, starting with Python built-ins, then Python’s native support for data structures, and finally Python’s powerful (and often underappreciated) standard library.

In this course, you’ll learn how to:

  • Use enumerate() to iterate over both indices and values
  • Debug problematic code with breakpoint()
  • Format strings effectively with f-strings
  • Sort lists with custom arguments
  • Use generators instead of list comprehensions to conserve memory
  • Define default values when looking up dictionary keys
  • Count hashable objects with the collections.Counter class
  • Use the standard library to get lists of permutations and combinations
Table of Contents

1 How to Stand Out in a Python Coding Interview (Overview)
2 Range vs Enumerate
3 List Comprehensions and Built-in Functions on Lists
4 print and breakpoint
5 f-Strings
6 Sorting
7 Sets
8 Generators
9 Dictionaries and collectionsdefaultdict
10 collectionsCounter
11 collectionsdeque
12 collectionsnamedtuple
13 string Module
14 itertools Module
15 functools Module
16 doctest Module and assert Statements
17 Easy Interview Question
18 Medium Interview Question
19 Hard Interview Question – Brute Force
20 Hard Interview Question – Suboptimal Solution
21 Hard Interview Question – Optimal Solution + PriorityQueue
22 How to Stand Out in a Python Coding Interview (Conclusion)