Hackerrank for practice

Post #8 Hackerrank

I use Hackerrank as practice tool to practice python since September 2020. I am the type of learner that needs a lot of practice to be proficient in something so hackerrank had been a good website to use when there wasn't many exercises in the textbooks I was following. I know there are other coding practice websites such as leetcode or codewars, but hackerrank was the first one I used and decided to stick with. It was the website from the syllabus someone posted on r/learnprogramming. I decided to follow this syllabus as much as I can.

At first, I was looking at the problems in the algorithm section, didn't understand a thing, thought it was too hard, and was wondering why the syllabus was recommending it. This was the time I was still understanding the fundamentals tools of python and finshed a good portion of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. However, I finally figured out that I was on the wrong section of the website. I should've started with easy python practice. Once I understood how hackerrank worked with the easy python practice section, I was able to move on to the algorithm style practice (but it took like a couple weeks until I noticed my blunder)

The good thing about hackerrank is that most of the problems are straightforward (however, there were some exceptions) and it was easy to check if your initial code was working properly as there is a "run" button before submitting your code. There are already test cases written, so it was relatively easy to find any failed tests and figure it out from there what values that caused your code to fail. But you need to use "hackos" to buy these test cases, which I don't understand completely why there is a premium currency to check the test cases. If I get stuck on a problem, the discussion section is good place to look to figure out what others have done to solve it. Of course looking at it from the start won't help, but once you figure it out and then look how others have solved it, you see a lot of weird one-liner codes.

For now, I think I will stick with hackerrank for practice, but I do understand regular code do not look like this nor is it this easy. I will try leetcode in the future to compare against hackerrank and I'll probably have a better informed opinion later.