Start with movement

Begin with sorting and searching. Watch how indexes move, which values are compared, and where swaps happen. Bubble Sort, Selection Sort, Insertion Sort, and Binary Search are good first topics because their state changes are visible and easy to pause.

Then learn containers

Study Stack, Queue, Linked List, Hashing, and Heap after the basics. These topics are less about formulas and more about how data is stored, accessed, and removed. Use the visual state summary to track top, front, node links, hash lookups, and parent-child heap relationships.

Move to graphs and problem solving

BFS, DFS, and Dijkstra are easier when you track the queue, visited set, active edge, and distance table. After graph traversal, try N-Queens, Fibonacci DP, and Activity Selection to compare backtracking, dynamic programming, and greedy decision making.