Best DSA Sheet for Beginners: Blind 75, NeetCode 150, Grind 75, and the Rest

You open a browser tab, search "best DSA sheet for beginners," and immediately get four different lists, four different problem counts, and four Reddit threads swearing each one is the only one that matters. The Blind 75 crowd says more is waste. The NeetCode 150 crowd says 75 leaves gaps. The Striver fans say both are shallow. Meanwhile, you haven't solved a single problem. You've been doing prep-for-prep for 45 minutes.

Here's what none of those threads tell you: the sheets overlap by about 85%. The decision is much smaller than it looks.

The Sheet You Finish Beats the Sheet Still in Your Bookmarks

All the popular sheets draw from the same pool: two-pointers, sliding window, BFS/DFS, binary search, dynamic programming, backtracking. The overlap between Blind 75 and NeetCode 150 alone is roughly 85%. Between any two popular lists, you're getting mostly the same signal.

Where sheets diverge is scope, structure, and how many weeks of your life they will consume. A beginner who picks a 450-problem sheet and burns out in week three learned nothing. A beginner who finishes 75 targeted problems has something real to build from.

That's the whole framework.

The Sheets, One by One

Blind 75

75 problems. No schedule, no video explanations. The original.

Yangshun Tay posted this on Teamblind in 2018, distilling his FAANG prep down to the problems he'd actually seen in interview loops. Someone reposted it on LeetCode's discussion board and it spread everywhere, spawning a thousand blog posts, YouTube arguments, and forum threads that are still going today. It covers arrays, binary search, trees, graphs, dynamic programming, and strings. Roughly 60% mediums, the rest easy.

What you get: a proven minimum viable syllabus. What you don't get: any hand-holding on approach or ordering.

Best for engineers who are already past the basics and prefer to find their own explanations. Coming in cold? Look elsewhere.

Grind 75

75 to 169 problems. Customizable schedule. Built for people who cannot be trusted with a blank calendar.

Yangshun Tay also built Grind 75, essentially a Blind 75 sequel with adult supervision baked in. You tell it how many weeks you have and how many hours per week, and it generates a daily practice plan ordered by importance and difficulty ramp. At 8 hours per week, it fits in 8 weeks. Push it to 15-20 hours and you're done in 3-4. The expanded version goes up to 169 problems if you have the runway.

It lives in the Tech Interview Handbook and is free.

Best for engineers with a specific interview date and limited time who want structure without paying for a course.

NeetCode 150

150 problems. Video walkthroughs for every problem. The most polished beginner experience.

NeetCode 150 is a proper superset of Blind 75, with real additions: tries, intervals, bit manipulation, more 2D dynamic programming. Every problem has a video walkthrough where the creator actually explains the thought process, not just the code. Watching someone reason through a problem out loud is a completely different experience from reading a solution and nodding at it.

The site (neetcode.io) also has a roadmap grouping problems by data structure, so you can go topic by topic instead of whatever random order your anxiety suggests.

This is the easiest entry point for beginners who need conceptual scaffolding, not just a problem list. Best for beginners with 2-3 months who want structure, explanations, and a clear progression.

NeetCode 250

250 problems. The extended cut.

Released at the end of 2024 as a deliberately beginner-first version. Each topic gets a few extra easy problems at the front to build confidence before the mediums start arriving.

If NeetCode 150 felt too steep in the first few weeks, this is the version to start with. Best for absolute beginners who want the NeetCode experience but found the 150 list moved too fast early on.

Striver's SDE Sheet

180+ problems. Interview-focused. The dominant list in the Indian tech community.

Raj Vikramaditya (Striver) built this list around what top Indian product companies and FAANG offices in India actually test. The SDE Sheet is organized by topic: arrays, linked lists, trees, graphs, and DP each get 10-20 problems ordered from warm-up to hard. The explanations on takeuforward.org are thorough and free.

If you're not already plugged into the Indian CS/FAANG prep ecosystem, you might not have heard of this list. That's a gap worth closing.

Striver's SDE Sheet is roughly 2-3 months of solid work for most beginners. Best for engineers targeting Indian product companies, or anyone who wants more reps per topic before moving on.

Striver's A2Z DSA Sheet

450+ problems. This is not a sheet. This is a semester.

The A2Z starts at absolute zero (arrays, sorting basics) and works all the way through advanced DP, graphs, and tries. At 450+ problems, it is closer to a full university curriculum than an interview prep list. People who have actually finished it have earned the right to mention it.

If you have 4-6 months and want to genuinely understand DSA rather than just recognize patterns, this is the most thorough free resource available. Finishing it is a project, not a sprint.

Best for CS students or career switchers building real foundations, not just clearing a loop.

LeetCode 75 (Official)

75 problems. Official LeetCode study plan. Built into the platform.

LeetCode's own curated list, separate from Blind 75. Covers the main patterns (two pointers, sliding window, prefix sum, BFS/DFS, DP, tries) and integrates directly into LeetCode's progress tracking. No external tool needed.

It's good. It's just less distinctive than the others: shallower than NeetCode 150, less structured than Grind 75, no video explanations.

Best for engineers who want to stay inside the LeetCode platform and not manage external lists.

Head-to-Head at a Glance

Sheet	Problems	Time Est.	Video Explanations	Schedule Tool	Best For
Blind 75	75	4-6 weeks	No	No	Self-directed, post-basics
Grind 75	75-169	3-8 weeks	No	Yes	Time-boxed prep
NeetCode 150	150	8-12 weeks	Yes	No	Beginners who need guidance
NeetCode 250	250	12-16 weeks	Yes	No	Complete beginners
LeetCode 75	75	4-6 weeks	No	No	LeetCode-native learners
Striver's SDE	180+	8-12 weeks	Partial	No	Thorough mid-level prep
Striver's A2Z	450+	4-6 months	Yes (partial)	No	Building DSA foundations

A meme about just starting to grind LeetCode, capturing the initial confidence before reality sets in

Picking a 450-problem list on a Sunday night is a form of optimism not seen outside of New Year's resolutions.

Two Questions That Actually Decide This

How much time do you have before you need to interview?

Under 6 weeks: Grind 75, maximum hours per week. The schedule tool calibrates it.
2-3 months: NeetCode 150. Best package of scope, explanations, and progression.
3-4 months: Striver's SDE Sheet for more reps per topic, or NeetCode 150 if you prefer speed with explanations.
4-6 months, or building foundations: Striver's A2Z.

Do you need explanations, or can you figure things out from editorial text?

If you can sit with a problem, get stuck, read the editorial, and absorb it on your own, Blind 75 or Grind 75 are fine. If you learn better watching someone reason through a problem out loud, NeetCode is built for you.

That's genuinely the whole decision. Don't overthink the overlap statistics. Don't benchmark yourself against someone who claims to have "done all three." Pick one list and finish it.

How to Work Through a Sheet Without Burning Out in Week Two

Picking the list is the easy part. Most people quit in weeks two or three. The reasons are always the same.

Set a time budget, not a problem budget. "I'll do two problems a day" breaks the moment one problem takes three hours. "I'll spend 90 minutes a day" doesn't. Time-box your sessions. If you're still stuck at the 45-minute mark, look at the hint and move on. Getting unstuck with help beats sitting paralyzed and feeling progressively worse.

Don't re-read solutions. Retrieve them. Passive reading feels productive and transfers almost nothing. After looking at an explanation, close it. Wait two days. Attempt the same problem again from scratch. If you can't reproduce it, your mental model is missing something, and reading the solution again won't fix it. Active retrieval will. See You Don't Know That Solution. You Just Recognize It.

Track your weak patterns, not your problem count. The number of problems you've "completed" is nearly meaningless if you can't solve an unseen variation of the same type. Whenever you needed to look something up, tag that pattern. Spend the first 15 minutes of each session on one tagged pattern before touching new material. Spaced repetition applied to your actual gaps beats grinding random problems.

Stop treating one-time exposure as mastery. Most people see a problem, understand the solution, check it off, and never return. Intervals of roughly 1 day, 4 days, and 10 days give the pattern time to consolidate. How Many LeetCode Problems to Solve? has more on why volume alone misleads you.

A GIF of someone grinding hard at LeetCode problems, the kind of determined spiral we've all been in at 11pm

The grind is real. So is the wall you hit around week three when you realize you can't remember anything you did in week one.

The biggest hidden cost of solo problem prep is the gap between solving quietly at your keyboard and performing under actual interview conditions. You can recognize every pattern on your list and still go blank when a human is watching and the clock is running. That's a performance condition, not a knowledge condition, and it only gets fixed by practicing in that specific condition. Running a few timed mock interviews before your real one (something like SpaceComplexity, which runs voice-based DSA interviews with rubric scoring) closes that gap in a way that solo grinding can't.