I used to remember days I couldn't even solve easiest problem. Medium problems were far beyond my expectations. I didn't know which path to follow for a certain problem. Even I looked into other people's solutions those were nightmares and I could only imagine how the F**# someone can come up with those solutions.
So this is how I started.
First Week
Revised all my DSA topics starting from stacks, queues, linkedList, trees, graphs, sorting, searching.
For all DS, not only I read theories, I implemented it in code, made my hand dirty.
There is a nice tool to visualize how different datastructure works.
https://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/
Second Week
Started with some of the easiest problems which involves simple Array and Hash table implementations, if I couldn't figure out the solution within next 30-1h I used to jump to discussion section and read other people's code.
At this time I could make sense of how other people's code works, as I have a good grasp of Data structure and I could really visualize those solutions running in my head.
Third Week
I started picking up some problem solving topics/tactics like
- Recursion
- Traversals like DFS/BFS
- Backtracking
- Two pointers
- Sliding window
These topics sounds strange at the beginning but once you start solving few problems and read some of the ideas, they look fairly straight forward to go through. So don't be scared with just the names.
Fourth Week
Now I am in my Fourth week and I can solve a lot of the easy problems by myself and even medium problems don't take that long to solve.
So far I have tried 100 problems with different Genres and out of them I have solved ~25 medium problems.
It gives me some kind of satisfaction, I would say codegasm (code + orgasm, [I don't know if this word already has a copyright :D]) and now I am really addicted into solving problems.
A LEETCODE A DAY, KEEPS FEAR OF LEETCODE AWAY