I have been wanting to get into competitive programming. I am quite an experienced programmer. Is leetcode still applicable, or are there other sites that are more suited?
Here are some more resources:
- USACO: https://train.usaco.org/ and https://usaco.guide/general/
- Codeforces: https://codeforces.com/ the de facto standard community for competitive programmers, regular contests with editorials, huge archive of problems (https://codeforces.com/problemset) with pretty accurate difficulty ratings so you can focus on problems of suitable difficulty if you want to progress quickly. They also have an incipient EDU section: https://codeforces.com/edu/courses that covers basic algorithms with practice problems.
The problems are indeed of very high quality. But it can be a difficult place to start. For example, even the very first problem has an overflow gotcha built into it. Also, Kadane's Algorithm appears as an early problem even though several mathematicians and computer scientists failed to discover it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_subarray_problem#Histo...
In practice it seems most people just use C++ (87.5%). Add Python3 (7.5%) and Java (5%) and 99% of submissions are accounted for.
* It has a large selection of problems with many good starter problems.
* Once you've solved a problem, you can see how others have solved it (wish more sites had this feature).
* You don't have to write I/O code, so you can just focus on the problem.