How to be a competitive programmer.

Competitive programmers are known for their problem solving skills. They show their skills by making different projects, taking part in different coding challenges and many more.

How do I become a competitive programmer?

- Pick a language.

When picking a programming language ask yourself these questions:

i. What is it that made you interested in programming?

ii. What do you want to do as a programmer?

The answers will navigate your steps and your programming career. And your answers might affect the technical stack that interests you. A front-end developer works on user-facing code, which involves learning JavaScript. A back-end developer works with the server, database, and application which may involve languages like Ruby or Python.

- Learn Data Structures

i. Beginner:

• Array

• Linked List

• Stack

• Queue

• Tree

ii. Intermediate

• Heap

• Priority Queue

• Huffman Tree

• Union Find

• Tries

• Hash Table

• TreeMap

iii. Proficient

• Segment Tree

• Binary Indexed Tree

• Suffix Array

• Sparse Table

• LCA

• Range Tree

iv. Expert

• Suffix Automation

• Suffix Tree

• Heavy-Light Decomposition

• Treap

• Splay Tree

• Dynamic Suffix Array

• Palindromic Tree

- Algorithms

i. Introduction

• Computer Algo

• Big O Notation

• Recurrence Basics

• Divide & Conquer

• Pseudocode Basics

ii. Graphs.

• Graph

• Basic Terminology

• Directed Graphs

• Representation

• Depth-first search

• Weighed Graph

• Topological sort

• Connectivity of graph

• Spanning Tree

iii. Search Algo

• Linear Search

• Binary search

• Jump search

iv. String Algo

• String basics

• Searching Tech

• Hamming Dist

• Suffix tree

• String Hashing

• Rabin-Karp Algo

v. Sorting Algo

• Insertion sort

• Merge sort

• Bubble sort

• Counting sort

• Quick sort

• Selection sort

vi. Dynamic Prog.

• Basics

• Edit distance

• Edit distance Alignment

vii. Hashing

• Hash table and collisions.

viii. Trees

• Tree and binary heap.

• Binary search tree

• Tree traversals

ix. Linear structure

• Singly linked list

• Doubly linked list

• Fixed-sized array

• Dynamic array

- Resources

• YouTube:

i. Neso Academy

ii. Simple Snippets.

iii. Freecodecamp

• Websites:

i. Geeks for Geeks.

ii. W3schools.

iii. Javatpoint.

- Practice Websites

• Hackerrank

• Exercism

• TopCoder

• CodeWars

• CodeChef

• SPOJ

Just some few tips.

Understand logic properly, build logics, understand the code and flow, write code and paper while practicing and don't copy the code.