Competitive Programming Course

I am happy to announce that I have completed Competitive Programming course of Coding Ninjas. I enrolled in this course to learn DSA & also to strengthen my problem-solving skills.

People question the need of purchasing online course as they think that they can learn through the resources/tutorials available for free. Initially, I had the same mindset and decided to learn concepts online through free courses. However, I did not have a concrete learning path and that hampered my progress. So, I switched to a paid course. In this course, the topics were divided into modules that you had to complete within a week or two. Each week would have at least two modules, with lectures, problems to practise and assignments to complete. We would also be given an online mock test every alternate week. Dividing the topics within weeks, and setting up time limits to do certain work within that time constraint was a beneficial and productive approach. I was able to learn better and had to be consistent in order to beat the deadlines approaching. This is one of the advantages of paid courses that they provide guided learning paths.

The video lectures given by the faculty were average to mediocre at best. The lectures are boring, the educators’ approach difficult to grasp and the way they write their code is majorly unreadable and tough to understand. Of course, one can argue that this was a cp course and it is meant for intermediate learners who have a solid grasp of DSA. I wasn’t an intermediate learner when I took this course. All I knew at the beginning were just the basics like sorting and binary search, so it is fair to make this point. However, this is a paid course. Thus, I expect them to at least be a bit better than the free video lectures you can watch online. If you compare their lectures to the likes of the ones made by guys like Striver(Take You Forward), Love Babbar or CodeStoryWithMIK you will see the level of difference yourself. And so, I gave up on watching their lectures and went to learn concepts online.

24/7 doubt support is one of the many features of this course so let me set it straight. It is not available the whole day. During the start, the modules were lighter so it was easy to find Teaching Assistants online. However, as the difficulty progressed, doubt support became unreliable. I sometimes had to wait 4 to 7 hours to get a teaching assistant to activate my doubt. During the end, things got even worse. There were only two TA’s left. The helpful one was only active for three hours and sometimes wasn’t available, so yes, the doubt support is pretty flawed. Again, Youtube educators like Love Babbar and Striver were a big help as I watched their problem-solving videos.

Topics covered in this course with the exception of Linked List and Binary Search Trees (I guess they weren’t that important from cp perspective). There were a lot of modules on tougher and remotely taught topics like geometry, combinatorics, advanced number theory, game theory, range query, fenwick trees etc. I wasn’t able to get the most out of these modules since they were very difficult and I wasn’t able to find good resource material online on these topics. I found the level of this course to be tough. This was mainly due to my limited knowledge of DSA.

Overall, it was worth it as I was able to learn a lot of topics during this stretch of time.