Mastering DSA
- It’s an art that needs to be practiced again and again till you’ve mastered it. It’s not about mugging up the algorithms and structures to use, but often you will find your self using hashmaps to solve 80% of your issue, because yeah that the reality at least what I’m aware of so far.
Algorithms, are a way to achieve your desired output in a efficient manner(mostly), we can also have in efficient algorithms that’s what we try to fix right?
This one thing will help you master DSA
- Just practice, it’s like you have to practice 100 times and that’s all, you won’t have to do that again, you need to build muscle memory.
- Build muscle memory instead of simple memory, I’ve often seen people think that once they’ve mugged it up they will be able to perform, no you won’t, but if you have the muscle memory you will be blazing through the problems like a hot knife through butter.
- Associate real life scenarios with the problems, I’m not talking about real life physical problems, we’re engineers and we talk about problems in CS, so find a problem, like you want to store 1mil records you want to use arrays and then you want to search, remember things like this, not the exact normie real world problems, you will thank me later.
- Break down the problem and solve how you would it in real life, don’t touch the keyboard before this, dry run with few tests.
- Then just convert the idea with the language of your choice, you can optimize later.
… will update once again after my finals are over, today was ML and I’m getting a C 🥲🥲