Mostly C++ and Python; although sample solutions will often be made available in both.

The NPTEL platform supports C, C++, Python, and Java.

Please see the prerequisites section. More specific prerequisites can be found in the weekly pages. Note that you need not be familiar with the implementations of all the algorithms mentioned in the prerequisites (in particular, DSU, BFS/DFS, MST, Shortest Paths, Flows — we will learn about concrete implementations in at least one language for these as a part of this course; but what we will not cover is proofs of correctness).

This course isn’t exactly Cracking the Coding Interview. There are more focused resources if that is your main goal and especially if you have something coming up soon 😃

Having said that, this course will develop your problem-solving abilities in general and give you some strong impetus to practice your programming skills as well. ✌️

So overall — it should be helpful! 🤞

Just remember that the course isn’t a magic bullet (and nothing is, AFAWK).

This is a hard one! The short answer is: it depends.

…on many factors, including where you were when you started the course, how much time you are able to put in, and so on.

In general, if you go through with the course you should be able to level up one or two notches from whereever you are starting out, but keep in mind that there are various factors that influcence these very specific measures of progress — so be patient and don’t judge yourself too much along the way.

Meanwhile, DO try to enjoy the process 🎉

Between 2.5 — 4 hours for the videos (especially if you pause and ponder as you go along, which is definitely recommended), and another 3-4 hours for the assignments (the MCQ/short answer and programming assignments combined).

If you are having some trouble with the programming assignments (WAs or TLEs) and you are absolutely convinced that there is a technical issue, please post a request for a clarification in the Discord community or the Google Groups mailing list. Someone will get back to you ASAP.

In general, to everyone who's working through either programming assignments or contest problems: we all know the feeling when you are ABSOLUTELY SURE that THE TEST CASES ARE WRONG.

We'll just say that while there are some very rare occurrences when there are mistakes, what is a lot more common is that there has been some misunderstanding of the problem statement. You might be right in the context of the problem that you have in your mind, but please consider that that problem may not be the same as the one you are supposed to solve.

Overall, we don't want to suggest that you shouldn't have the confidence to question the questions - you absolutely should. It's even okay to rant a bit with us - but when you are getting pointers suggesting that you might need to revisit your thought process, please do take the time to read everything VERY CAREFULLY again

Once again: errors aren't impossible at all, and we promise to make our best effort to let you know swiftly if there is an issue. But if you haven't heard from us about a correction, and you're hearing from peers for whom things worked out, then please be patient and go back to the drawing board a bit. Thanks!

Please see the answer to the question above, which applies here as well.

We would say that half of the problem is already solved because you've identified this issue yourself 🙂 That's a great first step.

Our recommendation is to not think of STLs as rote learning stuff. Spend some time going through the documentation when you first come across a new DS/algo, and get a feel for it. You don't need to understand every detail of how it is implemented under the hood, but you should have a general idea of what's happening. This should solve most of the issues.

If you know that set uses some kind of balanced binary search tree, then it becomes easier to remember that most operations using it would be . Similarly, if you know the difference between an ordered and an unordered map, you'll understand why their time complexities differ, and where exactly you can use each of them. So basically, we would suggest that you understand an STL (to an extent, not necessarily in detail), rather than try to remember features and complexities of it.

The next step is to get a feel for how 'heavy' an STL is. That is, the associated with a set has a pretty larger constant attached to it, as opposed to the pretty small constant attached to binary_search. These, you'll kind of learn the hard way 😃 You can also look up some references on this, but it's perhaps not worth spending too much time on it at the beginning.

Without being formally enrolled in the course, you can still have access to:

What you won't have access to:

If you are interested in the certification or accessing the assignments, then please watch out for the next edition of the course. Enrolment windows typically open during November/December and June/July every year.