Archive for the ‘Coding Tips’ Category
January 6th, 2010 | 
Author: Besides our teachers, mentors, or fellow friends, internet is a good place to ask if we have any programming-related questions. There are many forums or website dedicated to helping programmers. Experts from all over the world will happily help us. Often, we can obtain their answers only within minutes.
So, here is a list of good websites from which you can get programming supports.
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How often have you encountered this scenario?
You open a problem, read the problem statements, and realize that it requires a fast algorithm, because of many complexities behind it. And soon you realize again that the algorithm must really fast: the time limit is too strict.
And you learn many optimizations from many resources, and wonder which optimizations really take effect.
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UVa Online Judge is a great place to practice programming. It has hundreds of programming problems already, of many categories. By default it organizes the problems into chapters, not into the problems’ categories. So there are chapter I, II, etc.
But sometimes we want to practice a specific category of problems.
For example, we are learning dynamic programming, and want to try some DP problems. It is of course annoying to open every problem and to check whether or not it is feasible to solve with DP. There must be a solution to this dilemma.
I think it’s hard for us to implement a complicated algorithm, write down the code once, compile it, run, and get the expected result, in one shot. That rarely happens. Most of us will encounter some minor or major bugs in the code, and spend some time to find out what’s happening and debug. Programmer is a debugger, an old saying tells us.
Tired of encountering many bugs in your code? Well, that might be caused by your coding habits. Below are some tips on how to write code that is less error-prone than before!
As you learn new algorithms, you will find that it’s easier to remember them by trying to really code them in your chosen programming language. You may also have been solving programming problems and realize that some standard algorithms are used extensively and repetitively. What I want to suggest you is to create your own code library.
Many say that Linux is a perfect operating system for programmers. I agree with that. Linux is very stable, fast, and secure. Its repository is nearly complete for all programming needs. And there is one important reason: the Linux command line.
How many hours do you spend for coding in a week?
Yes, the amount of time you spend plays a role of improvement of our skill. It would be very good if we train more in programming contests. The problem is we usually do not know what contest runs when.
