Practice makes you perfect. When you solve different types of coding problems, it can improve your coding or programming skills. Furthermore, going through many practice problems is a great way to solidify your understanding of how the code should work. In this article, I’ll be mentioning the top 10 best tools to improve your programming skills.
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1. Google Code Jam
Hosted and administered by Google, Google Code Jam is an international programming competition that began in 2003 as a means to identify top engineering talent for potential employment at Google. This competition is consists of a set of algorithmic problems which must be solved in a fixed amount of time. Competitors, however, can use any programming language and development environment to obtain their solutions.
2. Project Euler
It was named after Leonhard Euler. Project Euler website is dedicated to a series of computational problems intended to be solved with computer programs which were created in 2001. It has over 600 problems with a new one added once every two weeks. The problems are of varying difficulty which can be sorted depending on the user. However, this can be solved in less than a minute using an efficient algorithm on a modestly powered computer. As of 2017, about 750,000 users, from all over the world is who have solved at least one problem used this website.
3. TopCoder
TopCoder is one of the largest community of competitive designers, developers, and data scientists in the world that hosts fortnightly online competitive programming competitions (also known as SRMs or single round matches) as well as weekly competitions in graphic design and development.
4. HackerEarth
Hackerearth is an online skill assessment tool for conducting programming tests to evaluate developers that supports almost all famous programming languages which aim to level up your programming and coding skills.
5. HackerRank
HackerRank is a technology company that focuses on competitive programming challenges for both consumers and businesses. It is where the developers compete by trying to program according to provided specifications that can be solved in a variety of programming languages such as Java, C++, PHP, Python, SQL, JavaScript and span multiple computer science domains.
6. CodeChef
Codechef is a nonprofit educational initiative that has a global competitive programming platform that supports over 50 programming languages. It has a large community of programmers that helps students and professionals test and improve their coding skills. Aside from this, it also aims to reach out to students while they are young and inculcate a culture of programming in India.
7. Sphere Online Judge (SPOJ)
SPOJ (Sphere Online Judge) is an online judge system that is available in 40 languages. It has over 315,000 registered users and over 20,000 problems to solve that is run by the Polish company Sphere Research Labs. The tasks are prepared by its community of problem setters or taken from previous programming contests. Moreover, it allows advanced users to organize contests under their own rules. They can also include forums where programmers can discuss how to solve a particular problem.
8. Exercism
Exercism website includes exercises that are suitable for code beginners and advanced programmers. Here you can download and practice problems from over 30 different programming languages.
9. CodingBat
Their problems work best as homework, or for self-study practice, or in a lab, or as live lecture examples. It is a free site of live coding problems to build coding skill in Java and Python.
10. Codeforces
Codeforces is a Russian website that is dedicated to competitive programming and provides different mode of services like participation in the short (2-hours) contests, challenge/hack other contestants solutions, ability to solve problems from previous contests for training purposes and many other.
Conclusion
Understanding and learning coding can make you go places, not just because it is in demand nowadays but also because it helps you explore options. As they say, programmers think in a very structured and logical way encouraging creative solutions to help solve problems thus, teaching us that with great patience comes to a great solution.
3 Comments
GeeksForGeeks
Tl;dr: Don’t bother doing this, just write more stuff (not algorithms).
Honestly this is a bad advice. The things you do here is maybe 0.1% of the work you will do in a month. And if it so happens that you need some algorithms that are here, you can google it. This won’t improve your skills that much, maybe just for google interview. The thing that is going to improve your programming skills is writing more programs, sometimes even a new language and small app with it will be a better option. Programming requires programming (working with database, security, rest services, custom solutions). Algorithms are, as I’ve said, 0.1% of that maybe. For the last six months I’ve written one algorithm in java at my work, and that’s it.
It was very helpful for me as well as other beginners .