Graphs were the most confusing topic for me when I started DSA. If you’re preparing for interviews, here’s how I broke down Graphs:
DFS, BFS, Union Find everything felt scattered. But once I got the basics right, it became one of the most rewarding topics.
Core concepts to understand:
- Adjacency List vs Matrix
- DFS and BFS traversal
- Topological Sorting
- Cycle Detection (Directed and Undirected)
- Union Find (Disjoint Set Union)
- Dijkstra's and Bellman-Ford algorithms
- Prim’s and Kruskal’s for MST
- Bridges, Articulation Points
- Graph Coloring
- Connected Components
Important patterns:
- Shortest path
- Detecting cycles
- Traversing all components
- Converting problems into graph models
Top LeetCode questions to practice:
1. Number of Provinces
2. Course Schedule
3. Word Ladder
4. Alien Dictionary
5. Network Delay Time
6. Minimum Spanning Tree (using Kruskal’s / Prim’s logic)
7. Is Graph Bipartite
8. Find Eventual Safe States
9. Reconstruct Itinerary
10. Redundant Connection
What helped me:
1. Visualizing graphs with pen and paper
2. Practicing small inputs manually
3. Watching animations (YouTube helped a lot)
4. Grouping problems by logic, not difficulty
Connect Vishakha Singhal ❤️
Repost it to share in your network.
Save it if you don't wanna lose it
Once the patterns click, they become one of the most high-return topics in coding interviews.
DFS, BFS, Union Find everything felt scattered. But once I got the basics right, it became one of the most rewarding topics.
Core concepts to understand:
- Adjacency List vs Matrix
- DFS and BFS traversal
- Topological Sorting
- Cycle Detection (Directed and Undirected)
- Union Find (Disjoint Set Union)
- Dijkstra's and Bellman-Ford algorithms
- Prim’s and Kruskal’s for MST
- Bridges, Articulation Points
- Graph Coloring
- Connected Components
Important patterns:
- Shortest path
- Detecting cycles
- Traversing all components
- Converting problems into graph models
Top LeetCode questions to practice:
1. Number of Provinces
2. Course Schedule
3. Word Ladder
4. Alien Dictionary
5. Network Delay Time
6. Minimum Spanning Tree (using Kruskal’s / Prim’s logic)
7. Is Graph Bipartite
8. Find Eventual Safe States
9. Reconstruct Itinerary
10. Redundant Connection
What helped me:
1. Visualizing graphs with pen and paper
2. Practicing small inputs manually
3. Watching animations (YouTube helped a lot)
4. Grouping problems by logic, not difficulty
Connect Vishakha Singhal ❤️
Repost it to share in your network.
Save it if you don't wanna lose it
Once the patterns click, they become one of the most high-return topics in coding interviews.