Among computer science students competitive programming is a mental sport that everyone wants to practice to enhance their coding knowledge.
Top MNCs and product based companies want candidates to be successfully equipped with strong programming and problem solving skills to meet their businesses or technical requirements. The path for learning competitive programming is challenging but interesting, it requires a lot of basic foundation which includes programming knowledge, data structures and algorithms etc.
In this comprehensive blog we will be covering in-depth about what is competitive programming, benefits of competitive programming, what are the steps for the beginners to get started with competitive programming along with popular topics that are important to cover in this journey and mostly asked questions. So let’s dive deep in the journey of understanding competitive programming.
What is Competitive Programming ?
Competitive Programming is a mental sport that helps computer science students or others who want to grab coding knowledge. It improves problem solving and programming skills in the way of becoming software developer, web developer and so on.
The basic foundation required to go for competitive programming is programming language understanding. At least knowledge of one programming language and basics of DSA is required to go for practice and improve productivity.
There are many coding platforms like LeetCode, Codeforces, Codechef, Hackerrank and so on. Once you are ready with one programming language (C, C++, Java and so on ) along with data structures and algorithms (DSA) then you can go for it.
Benefits of Competitive Programming
CP is very essential for anyone to compete in the technical field to get a renowned job. There are some benefits to learning CP for beginners as well as industry professionals too who want to earn competitive salaries in the market.
Improves Problem Solving Skills
Doing competitive coding is helpful to improve problem solving skills and make quick logic while writing any code. This practice not only helps in masters data structure and algorithm but also improves the foundation level.
Technical Interview Preparation
While practicing coding problems beginners can easily improve their logic building and because of that they are quick during technical interviews and able to crack it without any hassle. If you are a beginner and have sufficient problem solving of at least 250 coding problems on multiple patterns then it is easy for you to cover advanced problems too.
Prizes
Prizes are one of the motivating factors to compete and participate in multiple codeathons, hackathons as well as other coding quests or competitions. This factor creates the competitiveness approach among students to participate and rank themselves there to build a technical portfolio. Prices are in the form of coupons, Vouchers, Hoodies, digital gadgets and so on.
Improves Productivity and Speed
CP helps to build the mindset to develop intuition about the problem and this actually helps in interviews or software development if you don’t know the exact code behind it. This ultimately enhances the performance of a person and speeds up.
Improves Coding and DSA knowledge
Competitive Programming helps to grab the logic to solve a real-world problem with proper time complexity and constraints. We can easily solve multiple problems on individual data structure and algorithms concepts which includes arrays, strings, stacks , queues and so on that ultimately improves DSA knowledge.
Understanding of Time Complexity
While solving problems on competitive coding platforms we have some time complexity associated with the particular problem. We have to follow pre-defined constraints and time complexity to successfully meet with test cases. This helps a lot in technical interviews to show how good you are in creating logic and in writing efficient code.
Steps to Get Started With Competitive Programming
- Step 1 : First you need to learn at least one programming language properly whether it is C, C++, Java and so on.
- Step 2 : Then you have to cover data structures and algorithms.
- Step 3 : Select any one coding platform (like LeetCode, HackerRank and so on ) to start practicing problems and build logic.
- Step 4 : Participate weekly or monthly in coding contests and hackathons to check yourself.
- Step 5 : Appear for the technical interview or internships.
Popular Preparation Topics in Competitive Programming
Arrays in Competitive Programming
Arrays are the basic concept to solve easy or medium level questions that are mostly asked in technical interviews. With proper understanding of array data structure you will easily cover other advanced data structures too.
Bit Manipulation
Bit Manipulation is a widely used technique to solve complex coding problems and also a very important concept in terms of CP point of view. We will use different bitwise operators for the implementation of solutions which includes Bitwise AND, Bitwise OR and Bitwise NOT.
Stacks
Questions on stacks are also good to implement during practicing as sometimes interviewer also asks multiple concepts from this too.
Queues
Queue is opened from both the end that makes it flexible and fast for inserting and deleting elements in data structure . There are different pattern Questions we will see on the coding platform.
Conclusion
Overall Competitive Programming is a good to go practice or sport to learn while going for the software development interviews or planning to become a software developer. Competitive programming not only build your logic but also help you to compete in the competitive environment or you can say to your dream programming world.