Month 1 — Foundations that Stick

Week 1: Programming Basics & Mindset

• Variables, data types, I/O; functions; debugging; CLI basics; Git/GitHub.
• Big-O intuition; benchmarking simple loops.
• Lab: Build a “Time-It” utility to compare naive vs optimized loops.

Week 2: Control Flow & Core Patterns

• Loops, conditionals, recursion vs iteration; call stack.
• Pattern: Two-Pointers, Sliding Window (intro).
• Lab: Subarray sums, longest unique substring (string/window practice).

Week 3: Data Structures 1 — Arrays & Strings

• One-D, Two-D arrays, matrix traversal; string manipulation; hashing basics.
• Lab: Matrix spiral, frequency counter via hash map; Micro-project: CSV cleaner (CLI).

Week 4: Data Structures 2 — Linked Lists & Complexity

• Singly, doubly, circular lists; fast/slow pointers; in-place reversals.
• Lab: Reverse in k-groups, detect cycle; Quiz 1.

Month 2 — Classic Structures & Searching

Week 5: Stacks & Queues

• Stack ADT & applications (parentheses, expression eval), Queue & Deque, circular queues.
• Lab: Min-stack, sliding window maximum with deque; Micro-project: Undo/Redo engine.

Week 6: Trees 1 — Binary Trees & BSTs

• Tree traversal (DFS: preorder/inorder/postorder), BFS (level order), BST ops.
• Lab: Height, diameter, LCA (recursive & iterative).

Week 7: Trees 2 — Balanced Trees & Heaps

• AVL basics, heap (min/max), priority queue use-cases.
• Lab: k-largest/merge k-sorted lists; Micro-project: Task scheduler using heap.

Week 8: Graphs 1 — Representations & Traversals

• Adjacency list/matrix; DFS/BFS; connected components; topological sort.
• Lab: Course scheduling (DAG), cycle detection; Quiz 2.

Month 3 — Algorithms that Pay Off

Week 9: Graphs 2 — Shortest Paths & MST

• Dijkstra, BFS on unweighted graphs, Bellman-Ford (overview); MST (Kruskal/Prim).
• Lab: City bus route finder (shortest path), network clustering (MST).

Week 10: Searching & Sorting Deep Dive

• Linear vs Binary Search; boundary finding; custom comparators.
• Bubble/Selection/Insertion (for insight), Merge/Quick/Heap Sort (for practice).
• Lab: Sort visualizer; Micro-project: Log sorter for SMEs.

Week 11: Greedy & Divide-and-Conquer

• Activity selection, interval scheduling, Huffman coding idea.
• Divide-and-Conquer patterns; Master Theorem (intuition).
• Lab: Meeting rooms, min platform problem; closest pair (outline).

Week 12: Recursion & Dynamic Programming

• Overlapping subproblems, memoization vs tabulation; 1-D, 2-D DP.
• Lab: Knapsack, coin change, LIS; Quiz 3.

Month 4 — From Patterns to Products

Week 13: Advanced Hashing & Practical Optimizations

• Collision handling, custom hash; sets/maps; amortized analysis.
• Lab: UPI-like transaction deduplicator (hash set/map).

Week 14: Problem Solving Playbook

• Pattern catalog: prefix sums, difference arrays, binary search on answer, bit tricks.
• Lab: Allocate books/paint fence (binary search on answer), bitmask DP (intro).

Week 15: Capstone Build Sprint

• Pick one domain problem; design → implement → test → profile → README.
• Examples:
• Smart Ration Queue Manager (queues + heap)
• Local Delivery Route Optimizer (graphs + Dijkstra)
• Crop-Yield Planner (DP)
• Metro Shortest Path CLI for nearest stations (graphs)