Published in · 6 min read · Aug 24, 2019
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This article is also available on my blog
I started Leetcode as a daily routine early Nov 2018 while I was taking part time online master course Machine Learning at Georgia Tech and having full time job. It was quite hard to find enough time to tackle a single question from scratch. So, my strategy was to read questions and most up-voted answers in the discussion to get the sense of questions tag by tag. I found that it is extremely helpful for me to read solutions before attempting to solve the problems all by myself. It saved me time and allow me to read many questions in the same tag. So I could recognized variants of specific type of questions easily in the future. It also avoid the unnecessary frustration in early phase. Many people may feel frustrated as they cannot even solve easy problems at the very beginning. Actually this is very common. Reading solution early on can actually help avoid that. I know some people may disagree with this point. YMMV. (Besides leetcode, I have compiled this list of resources that helped me)
In my opinion, this is more effective for most of the people who are not guru in algorithms. But don’t get me wrong, I still need to wake up as early as 6 am to leetcode for those days.