approaches!

hello people i am tired of thinking what to do to learn a good programming. During June and July challenges this year i tried so hard but i am not able to solve more than 3 problems. What on earth can i read or code so that i can also build approach to solve problems?? When i was introduced to programming world(almost a years ago) i thought programming is a thing that nobody can teach you, you learn it yourself. But now i doubt it, i am confused how the hell people make 10 new approaches in every monthly contest??
Please if anybody faced such situation or anybody know any solution then he must share the knowledge as it increase with sharing.

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Programming is about practice, solve practice problems first.

Secondly, in Long Challenges, It is absolutely fine if you are able to solve only 3 problems, but after that, in the period of 20 days, you should practice the new algorithms and understand them and also have a look at editorials of problems.

Just refer these two links, these links will answer better than me :slight_smile:

http://discuss.codechef.com/questions/46684/a-good-start-to-competitive-programming-for-a-newbie
http://discuss.codechef.com/questions/18752/what-are-the-must-known-algorithms-for-online-programming-contests

The best one (exactly for you :slight_smile: ) :
http://discuss.codechef.com/questions/37684/learn-competitive-programming
Read comment as well

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@uniquephase I am new to competitive coding and so i absolutely understand your plight . So thing is that it’s a learning process , you might across coders who do 10 questions in a contest (long) , try searching about how they learnt it .
The many great coders from India who i know so far told me that the key to their success is practice and only practice.

The question you might be thinking is that where to practice from , I have learnt from them that solving about 200 problems on Spoj have got one of them to Acm world finals from initially solving about 2-3 problems on code chef in a long contest.

Work on it :slight_smile:

For competitive coding along with code chef you must also try hackerrank , code forces , topcoder .

I Hope this helps mate :slight_smile:

happy Coding :slight_smile:

From which year did you start learning programming(I wondered by seeing your profile (accuracy of 90.0% with 8 problems solved in single attempt in JULY14))

2013 august

solving about 200 problems on Spoj

on Spoj

There must be a catch here, since 200 problems on SPOJ could mean 200 bruteforces or 200 (insert one algorithm/DS here)s, which really wouldn’t teach anything besides writing working codes quickly. Or maybe I’m just used to the standards of CERC and such regionals, and that guy was in a much weaker regional.

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@demon_21 : Are you really from Electronics discipline? and how you did 8 questions in less than an hour ?

thanks bhavesh , i get the point that practice is the key to success.
I conclude that instead of solving too many problems with brute force , one should learn algorithms.

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@demon_21 thanks for your nice suggestions, i am keenly interested to know how did you solve 8 problems in less than an hour and some problems just in a minute or two.
even @ACRush is not as fast as you. Please share your key to this speed.