Well, I'm not an extremely great coder, and many of these links are also helpful and I'll probably look them up to see if I can also study for Round 1. I looked at some of the past ones and they're actually quite hard compared to the Qualification round.
I'm also going to try looking up bit manipulation because currently it sounds a bit complicated. Okay, about my school of thought. I feel its okay to look at other people's code but, you should try on your own first. Currently I'm enrolled in a coursera course on Discrete Optimization (melbourne) and they have videos on programming techniques and then you have to do the exercises. This is how I see looking at code. It should be for learning concepts that you might not understand. That's another problem, sometimes just looking at someone's code doesn't exactly help. The best way would be if you find a solution online, or and explanation on a solution to a problem. So after you looked at a solution or a piece of code, you should be able to understand it and code it yourself. Try coding it yourself to make sure you understand it. On Monday, 14 April 2014 22:03:38 UTC-4, [email protected] wrote: > Thank you very much for all your insights. > Visited some of the links being recommended and whoa, competitive programming > is a whole new world (and a very different one at that). > I consider myself not a newbie to programming but I just didn't develop > and/or improve any skills that would be useful in this area. Perhaps the > equivalent of slacking of in the computer science sense. > Now would be a good time to start though and I will try to see what I can > improve between now and Round 1. > To sum up what I understood from the two posts: > -Practice a lot. Solve a lot. Experience a lot of types of problems. > -Train in coding error-free algorithms in the shortest possible time <- I > admit I really didn't think much of this aspect until it was mentioned. > -Study algorithms. > > I do have a question about the 'solving' part. > What is your school-of-thought regarding looking at someone else's solution > if you really really cannot solve a problem? > 1. No! Must not use a walkthrough. Try and try until ... > 2. Acceptable. Perhaps looking at someone else's solution can enlighten you > more? (Then maybe the question will be the timing when to start looking at > the solution of others?) > 3. Others. please specify: _____________________ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Code Jam" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-code/c019e483-05bd-4a44-ba31-c1340b3175ca%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
