Preparation Guide to Competitive Programming for Free

Preparation Guide to Competitive Programming for Free
Preparation Guide to Competitive Programming for Free

Introduction

Coding Ninjas’ Competitive Programming course is a guide to Competitive Programming for free that aims to deliver a superior and clear conceptual understanding of competitive coding topics and every nook and corner required to ace competitive coding contests.

With an array of 100+ videos and 50+ problem solutions, this course provides one of the most comprehensive courses out there. All you would require is a basic knowledge of mathematics and programming fundamentals and implementations of data structures.

This free trial course consists of six chapters starting from Intro to Competitive Programming, Time and Space Complexity analysis, searching and sorting applications, and greedy problems.


This curates most of the basic topics you would need to approach and solve a contest problem. What you will get through this course are confidence and conceptual understanding along with the errors that you might come up with during contests. This will not only help you ace coding contests but also prepare your problem-solving skills for interviews in top product-based companies.

Each of the chapters includes:

  • Video lectures with detailed explanations
  • Problems and assignments
  • Live problem solving with coding

Why should you opt for this course?

There will be multiple free courses available in the market but what really sets apart Coding Ninjas is the personalisation option that is provided keeping in mind the needs of the students. The contents include detailed explanations, and anyone with some basic skills can easily learn and pick it up.

This course also includes 2000+ Teaching Assistants support across India who are ready to solve any doubt you have as soon as possible with a feature of audio and video call to solve intricate doubt in the code. The course is taught by industry experts who have expertise in this field and will be the best guidance you can ever have.

There will be one basic test at the end of the course that will improve your skillset and help you identify key focus areas for improvement. What can be better than learning and also earning a certificate? This also provides a course completion certificate once you complete the course.

The best thing is if you are stuck in a situation that requires you to pause the course for few days, you can pause it for up to seven days without incurring any charges.

Why learn Competitive Coding?

Competitive programming is one of the buzzwords nowadays and its popularity comes from regular coding contests around the world and their intensive problems which test the problem-solving abilities of participants.

blog banner 1

It is a mind sport where few problems are to be solved under a certain amount of time and the fastest and most efficient ones make it to the leaderboard. This enhances your thinking abilities and helps you to come with efficient solutions faster.

Competitive coding provides the following:

  • Enhances thinking ability 
  • Faster intuition for solving problems
  • Trains your brain for interview and machine coding rounds
  • Develops the correct aptitude to crack software developer roles too
  • And of course, it’s always fun! 

You can choose any language to compete in the various contest and showcase your skills to get good ranks and stars. Many top product-based companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc sometimes hire from competitive coding contests. Because it becomes increasingly necessary to come up with an efficient solution to a given problem that not only saves CPU time but also overhead cost for companies.

So, if you are someone who aims for getting into the big tech gigs then acing Competitive Programming becomes a crucial step towards that goal and the Coding Ninjas Free trial course is just waiting for your first step.

Features of Free Trial

In this Guide to Competitive Programming, you will be learning a comprehensive yet curated set of problems as 

  • Introduction to Competitive Coding 
  • How to approach and solve problems in real contests
  • Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) to test your skills on important topics
  • Searching and sorting algorithms and their applications (most important in view of coding contests)
  • Basics of Recursion: Being one of the most important concepts and forms the basis for dynamic programming (popular topic for tech interviews)
  • Time Complexity Analysis: To know you have the most efficient program or not you will require to assess your own code. The intuition of optimism through simple algorithms is the aim of this section. Know your Code!
  • In language tools, you will be supported with STL in C++ videos along with support for Java, Python in PDF formats that you can easily download and go through. 
  • Greedy Algorithms: All you need to know about greedy problems and their approach with coding sections to test your understanding. These also contain hints to help you out whenever you need the slightest of help.

You will also have one test after the completion to test your learnings and the course will contain a total of 19 coding problems to test whether you have understood the concepts taught in the course. The videos also explain the concepts of Complexity calculations for each of the problems that will be discussed.

If you are stuck in any problem, hints are there to help you out. Still, stuck at a problem? Check out the detailed solution through this Guide to Competitive Programming and understand the intuition and concept used, so that next time you see the problem it becomes a piece of cake to solve it.

You can check out the sections which have Doubts, mentor inquiry and course pause option.

Each of these chapters has video lectures and practice problems with a dedicated code section.

You can opt for asking doubts, hints and finally a solution to a particular problem. Although if you have not solved the problem, seeing the solution will penalise your score while if you have completed the solution then you can see the solution provided by experts without incurring any penalty and optimise your code.

Prerequisites

This course is generally for beginners and every aspect is explained with in-depth tutorials although prior knowledge of basic coding is beneficial. The fundamentals of data structures and how to apply them in problem-solving will also help you get a better overview from this course. You can take up the course irrespective of any language you are comfortable with.

  • Basic Mathematics
  • Fundamentals of programming

Companies that typically hire candidates with these characteristics

Top companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc. hire talents with high problem-solving skills. These companies also target candidates with excellent competitive coding tracks that can only be built with proper guidance and practice.

Some of these companies also hire candidates who have participated in ACM ICPC, which happens to be one of the most recognized competitive coding contests around the world, and getting a chance to even participating in the competition is a huge recognition itself. 

Also, read about the preparation guide for ACM ICPC

Let me also jot down some important company-wise topics that are important to crack the interviews:

  • Google: Focuses on Graph-based problems are asked quite often.
  • Samsung: Trees and Binary Search tree topics along with a strong understanding of recursion are necessary. 
  • Amazon: likes to explore a wide range of problems including recursion, dynamic programming, graph traversals, sorting and searching problems, binary search, etc.
  • Microsoft: generally doesn’t allow much support for helper libraries like STL for C++ in the machine coding rounds, hence requires an in-depth clear understanding of linked list, stacks, queues, as they have to be coded from the basics and that’s what this course will help you with too.
  • Facebook: interviews focus on graph-based problems and their traversals.

Other popular competitive coding contests like Google Hashcode, Codejam, Facebook coding challenge, etc, are some of the most well-known prestigious platforms to showcase your competitive coding skills and will get a chance to be interviewed by tech giants.

These competitions provide a platform to test the candidate’s ability to tackle pressure and come up with the most efficient solution in less time. That’s what any big company will be looking for. You can practice company-wise popularly asked coding questions from Coding Ninjas free practice section CodeStudio. 

Application-based learning

Let me jot down an example of how this course will help you. Sorting algorithms are the most favourite interview questions as well as competitive coding concepts, most of the problems require some kind of sorting algorithms to make solutions more efficient.

The course content also develops the intuition of using such algorithms to a problem that otherwise will be difficult to solve and would require more time too. This course will also walk you through all the dry-running steps you would require to understand the concepts.

You can choose to pack more such tricks in your pocket by joining the paid course, as it provides a wider variety of problems with their intuitions. Each problem is explained with the concept, intuition, dry-run, machine coding such that it leaves no stone unturned to make you understand.

The paid course is also valuable for its peer learning and placement assistance feature that helps you compete and learn from your peers and also take part in the hiring challenges organised by companies through Coding Ninjas.

Details of Competitive Programming Free & Paid Course

FeaturesFree CoursePaid Course
Access to videos and assignments with problemsAvailableAvailable
Doubt SupportAvailableAvailable
ConceptsBasic & intermediate certificatesAdvance
CertificatesFree trial completion certificateCourse completion and excellence certificate
Peer LearningNot AvailableAvailable
Placement AssistanceNot AvailableAvailable

How to enroll?

All you need to do is to check out the link and enroll yourself for seven days free trial.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which competitive programming sites are good for beginners?

For beginners, I would recommend Hackerrank, Codechef, as these sites are pretty easy to comprehend and provide support for most of the languages and Hackerrank also provides difficulty-based problem recommendations.

Which programming language should I learn for competitive programming?

Although you can choose any programming language it is recommended to mostly use C++, Python, or Java for beginners. C++ has support for STL that is a huge support for writing codes for complex problems. Java provides support for garbage cleaning and hence reduces the chances of errors. Python syntax is fairly simple and small and hence requires fewer lines of code than others.

How do I start a competitive programming medium?

All you need is to be consistent to learn and practice every day. Problem-solving can sometimes be intimidating but with the help of the Coding Ninjas course, you would not need to be scared of competitive coding anymore. Follow up the free course and you can decide before going for the paid ones.

How long does it take to learn competitive coding?

This course is around 4-6 months and this is the time generally taken for someone to learn competitive coding. If you are someone with a bit of experience then consistent coding is the only way to perform well.

Key Takeaways

Competitive programming is a fun sport that involves problem-solving for the rush of finding wonderful and elegant solutions to problems. It is also a valuable skill if you are looking forward to work at big tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

It provides the best way to improve your efficiency and problem-solving skills to design and implement solutions. This is the best chance to learn about it through Coding Ninjas Comprehensive Guide to Competitive Programming.

Scoring a decent amount of rank among thousands of competitors will not only boost your confidence but also open up new opportunities like hiring challenges from top product-based companies. Nowadays most product-based companies hire from competitive programming contests.

Coding Ninjas aims for providing the best platform to hone your skills and ace your goals as efficiently as possible. This course provides all the necessary concepts you would ever require to ace competitive coding contests and interview rounds as you will be taught by industry experts.

All you need to do is take up the free trial course through this Guide to Competitive Programming, experience the best mentors walking you through every problem, and once you are satisfied opt for the paid course for all-around preparation. So, what are you waiting for? Jump right in and ace your dream companies and master competitive coding right now with this Guide to Competitive Programming!

By Aniruddha Guin