Which site is best suited to start Competitive programing journey as an absolute beginner?

Question

there are various websites which provide plateform to practice CP but which site is beat suited for absolute beginners to CP who have basic knowledge of any one programming language

Answer 1

In my case the journey was as follows.

1. Initially I started with Hackerrank to solve easy and medium problems. I feel Hackerrank is a really good site for noobies. Better to start with language challenges. Pickup any language of your choice and try to get 5 star in it, after that you can start solving some of the easy and medium problems.

2. As a next step, I started solving problems on Spoj. I downloaded their problem set and started solving them in my IDE. I solved around 130 problems, which really boosted my basics of Algorithms and Data structures.

3. After that I really never stick to any other sites, randomly kept on solving the problems from different sites such as CodeChef, InterviewBit, Leetcode, Geeks for Geeks. But I would really suggest to stick to CodeChef and CodeForces and do better in their contests. In my case I started a little bit later on CP, hence had to manage everything. But if you are doing good in few contests, it would really add some value to your resume ( when you are fresher).

 

One of the major problem, when you are a noobie is, it's easy to get frustrated and give up. No matter how genius you are, in the beginning you will definitely fail. Just keep on going and practice.

 

Never, ever, Give up.

Comments

Thanks for contributing , Pradeep :)

Answer 2

My vote goes to Hackerrank.

And here is why I think so :

Clearly the most intuitive user interface among all the competitive programming website. It's built with user in mind
The online editor is actually usable. Syntax Highlighter and forking working flawlessly. Many questions have default template which is very useful
Ability to test the code with sample test cases without typing input data manually. It saves a lot of time.
All questions are tagged with appropriate difficulty level. This is a great thing for a beginner.
Questions are classified into topics. If you want to practice only Dynamic Programming you can do so. This combined with previous point makes it an awesome platform for learning new algorithms
The website scales really well. I have participated in many competitions and I have organised many competition on Hackerrank and I have never experienced scalability issues at the start of contest which is very common with CodeChef.
Problems can be downloaded in PDF. Thus, you can work offline.
Once the website is loaded, most requests are asynchronous in nature - faster and low data consumption.