What Are the Best Websites to Practice Coding?
Sometimes, learning through courses is not enough. Theoretical knowledge sounds great, but in reality, it is not worth much if you don’t start practicing. You can learn about driving a car but if you don’t actually start driving one, your skills won’t be worth much, unless you want to be an instructor.
It’s the same with programming. There are lots of courses which you could follow to learn stuff from, however, without putting all that stuff into practice, you won’t be able to move ahead and learn more. Coding is mostly about practice and problem solving.
Here are the best sites that allow you to actually practice coding and hone your skills.
Coderbyte
This is a great site that allows practical problems to be solved. You get various situations that professionals have had to face many times. These problems are not specific to a single language, you can practice over 16 different languages. There are many problems you could go through, from typical interview questions that literally every programmer faces, to real world problems that have plagued systems worldwide.
Nothing beats practical experience and Coderbyte has plenty of it.
HackerRank
No hacking here, just a bunch of challenges meant to evaluate your skill. Based on the way you complete the challenge, how quickly and how cleanly. It is a great site if you want to test your already good programming skills. The site is also meant as a way for industry leaders and companies to find new employees, by seeing their performances in certain areas.
The site is not all about competition, of course. There are tutorials that you can do and explanations that could help you solve various problems. It is a good learning and practice tool, but definitely not for absolute beginners.
Codewars
This is an interesting take on solving coding problems. It is a site dedicated to coding, but from a perspective of a martial art. You take the role of a student and by coding successfully, by solving challenges, you slowly rank up to the rank of master. It takes time and there will be other contenders, though there can never be too many masters.
After you actually level up and solve many challenges, you will be able to pass your knowledge to others. While also a good site to practice coding on, it is a site that can inspire you to work on yourself when you’re feeling down.
TopCoder
Want a real challenge that has actual stakes? TopCoder is there for you. It has many challenges which are actual problems from real world companies. Challenges are often broken into pieces so that a variety of programmers can take a crack at them. Once they are solved, they are made whole again and the client gets a solution while the programmers get recognition and in some cases, money.
This community is geared toward professionals but even amateurs can do work here if they know the language and the problems.
CodeChef
This is an Indian site, or rather, Indian-based, which operates all over the world. It is a site with professional challenges and contests, some of which are worth money. However, when you take beginner and other learning challenges, the people tend to be friendly and supportive, often helping in chat and writing various algorithms and solution ideas.
It is a great site if you want to practice programming. They accept solutions in over 55 programming languages.
Why not start learning programming on your own, or rather putting that knowledge into practice with these challenge sites? Try it out and you might even land a job.
