Grokking Binary Search for Coding Interviews_468 x 60 copy.png

Binary Search (BS) is, arguably, the most popular question in coding interviews. Even when you see that a problem can be solved with BS, it can be tricky to handle all of the indexes and base cases in the solution. What if there was an approach that could work for all BS problems? 
This course was designed from scratch with this one goal in mind. We'll explore one technique that can handle any BS problem. The practice problems in this course were carefully chosen to cover the most frequently asked BS questions in coding interviews. At the end of this course, you will feel confident to handle BS questions during phone or on-site interviews, as well as with all of the follow-ups about its time and space complexity.

Binary Search for Coding Interviews

## Problem statement

We are given a sorted array of distinct integers and a target value. We will return the index if the target is found. Otherwise, we will return the index to where it would be if it were inserted in order.

**Constraints:**
-   $1 \leq nums.length \leq 10^3$
-   $-10^3 \leq nums[i] \leq 10^3$
-   $nums$ contains _distinct_ values, sorted in _ascending_ order.
-   $-10^3 \leq target \leq 10^3$

**Example 1: General case**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], 5    
Output: 2
```
**Example 2: Missing element case**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], 3    
Output: 1
```
**Example 3: Insert to the end of the array**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], 15    
Output: 5
```
**Example 4: Insert to the beginning of the array**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], -1    
Output: 0
```

# Problem statement

We are given a sorted array of distinct integers and a target value. We will return the index if the target is found. Otherwise, we will return the index to where it would be if it were inserted in order.

**Constraints:**
-   $1 \leq nums.length \leq 10^3$
-   $-10^3 \leq nums[i] \leq 10^3$
-   $nums$ contains _distinct_ values, sorted in _ascending_ order.
-   $-10^3 \leq target \leq 10^3$

**Example 1: General case**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], 5    
Output: 2
```
**Example 2: Missing element case**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], 3    
Output: 1
```
**Example 3: Insert to the end of the array**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], 15    
Output: 5
```
**Example 4: Insert to the beginning of the array**
```
Input: [2,4,5,9,11], -1    
Output: 0
```

Let's solve one basic problem and test our approach.

Difficulty Level: Easy

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Insert Position

Problem statement