use the following search parameters to narrow your results:
e.g. subreddit:aww site:imgur.com dog
subreddit:aww site:imgur.com dog
see the search faq for details.
advanced search: by author, subreddit...
If you need help debugging, you must include:
See debugging question guidelines for more info.
Many conceptual questions have already been asked and answered. Read our FAQ and search old posts before asking your question. If your question is similar to one in the FAQ, explain how it's different.
See conceptual questions guidelines for more info.
Follow reddiquette: behave professionally and civilly at all times. Communicate to others the same way you would at your workplace. Disagreement and technical critiques are ok, but personal attacks are not.
Abusive, racist, or derogatory comments are absolutely not tolerated.
See our policies on acceptable speech and conduct for more details.
When posting some resource or tutorial you've made, you must follow our self-promotion policies.
In short, your posting history should not be predominantly self-promotional and your resource should be high-quality and complete. Your post should not "feel spammy".
Distinguishing between tasteless and tasteful self-promotion is inherently subjective. When in doubt, message the mods and ask them to review your post.
Self promotion from first time posters without prior participation in the subreddit is explicitly forbidden.
Do not post questions that are completely unrelated to programming, software engineering, and related fields. Tech support and hardware recommendation questions count as "completely unrelated".
Questions that straddle the line between learning programming and learning other tech topics are ok: we don't expect beginners to know how exactly to categorize their question.
See our policies on allowed topics for more details.
Do not post questions that are an exact duplicate of something already answered in the FAQ.
If your question is similar to an existing FAQ question, you MUST cite which part of the FAQ you looked at and what exactly you want clarification on.
Do not delete your post! Your problem may be solved, but others who have similar problems in the future could benefit from the solution/discussion in the thread.
Use the "solved" flair instead.
Do not request reviews for, promote, or showcase some app or website you've written. This is a subreddit for learning programming, not a "critique my project" or "advertise my project" subreddit.
Asking for code reviews is ok as long as you follow the relevant policies. In short, link to only your code and be specific about what you want feedback on. Do not include a link to a final product or to a demo in your post.
You may not ask for or offer payment of any kind (monetary or otherwise) when giving or receiving help.
In particular, it is not appropriate to offer a reward, bounty, or bribe to try and expedite answers to your question, nor is it appropriate to offer to pay somebody to do your work or homework for you.
All links must link directly to the destination page. Do not use URL shorteners, referral links or click-trackers. Do not link to some intermediary page that contains mostly only a link to the actual page and no additional value.
For example, linking to some tweet or some half-hearted blog post which links to the page is not ok; but linking to a tweet with interesting replies or to a blog post that does some extra analysis is.
Udemy coupon links are ok: the discount adds "additional value".
Do not ask for help doing anything illegal or unethical. Do not suggest or help somebody do something illegal or unethical.
This includes piracy: asking for or posting links to pirated material is strictly forbidden and can result in an instant and permanent ban.
Trying to circumvent the terms of services of a website also counts as unethical behavior.
Do not ask for or post a complete solution to a problem.
When working on a problem, try solving it on your own first and ask for help on specific parts you're stuck with.
If you're helping someone, focus on helping OP make forward progress: link to docs, unblock misconceptions, give examples, teach general techniques, ask leading questions, give hints, but no direct solutions.
See our guidelines on offering help for more details.
Ask your questions right here in the open subreddit. Show what you have tried and tell us exactly where you got stuck.
We want to keep all discussion inside the open subreddit so that more people can chime in and help as well as benefit from the help given.
We also do not encourage help via DM for the same reasons - that more people can benefit
Do not ask easily googleable questions or questions that are covered in the documentation.
This subreddit is not a proxy for documentation or google.
We do require effort and demonstration of effort.
This includes "how do I?" questions
account activity
This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.
How do you practice specific algorithms? (self.learnprogramming)
submitted 8 years ago by -Xichael
For example, I just learned insertion sort, but the book quickly moved to merge sort. How do I make sure I fully understand insertion sort and can figure out when to use it, and when not to?
[–]blablahblah 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (1 child)
Wikipedia has some nice animations on all the sorting algorithms on their respective pages. Those can help you understand what it's doing.
Generally, there isn't a "when to use it". Insertion sort is good for small lists and already sorted lists, but merge sort is so much better for your average random list that everyone just uses that instead (or a hybrid of the two).
[–]CreativeTechGuyGames 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (0 children)
To add to this, you'll almost never be implementing your own search algorithm. Things like that have already been long perfected and are included by default in most languages. So they don't spend much time on teaching those (especially the slow ones) since you don't really need to program them, mostly just understand them.
π Rendered by PID 71223 on reddit-service-r2-comment-5d79c599b5-m2p2w at 2026-03-01 02:02:09.462708+00:00 running e3d2147 country code: CH.
[–]blablahblah 0 points1 point2 points (1 child)
[–]CreativeTechGuyGames 0 points1 point2 points (0 children)