Why Should You Bother With Sets?

Almost no one really liked them while studying math back in school as they seemed pretty boring, but if you are preparing for a Python coding screen or a whiteboard interview and you wish to nail it, you really have to learn about sets operators and methods right now. Sets are a weapon you need to have in your arsenal as common uses include removing duplicates, **computing math operations **on sets (like union, intersection, difference and symmetric difference) and membership testing.

“If you are preparing for a Python coding screen or whiteboard interview and you wish to nail it, you really have to learn about sets operators and methods right now”

Sets are not exactly the first thing I learnt in my Python journey either. If you you are a hands-on person like I am, you probably started with some real projects meaning that initially, you almost certainly used advanced packages more than built-in modules. However, as I begun solving algorithms to interview with big tech companies, I realized that sets were recurrently appearing in many challenges with different levels of difficulty and often offered shortcuts to solve them.

“I realized that sets were recurrently appearing in many challenges with different level of difficulty and often offered shortcuts to solve them”

In one recent article, I presented and shared the solution for a number of Python algorithms that I have been challenged with in real interviews

#data-science #algorithms #interview #data-engineering #python