The LeetCode Beginner's Guide

Additional Tools and Resources

Slug: additional-tools-and-resources

As you progress in your coding journey, you will encounter problems of increasing difficulty and some with increasingly complex inputs (like tree problems).

When facing a challenging problem, whether you feel stuck or you found a solution and just want to see how it compares to your peers' solutions, you can visit the problem's discuss section. Each problem has its own unique discuss section where you can read others' solutions to the current problem and share your own.

Tree Visualizer, Discussion Posts, and Official Solution Articles

The following video will introduce you to the predefined classes that are provided for more complex inputs, such as tree problems. Here, we will also see how to use the tree visualization tool, load all of the example test cases, and create custom test cases. Finally, this video will introduce the discuss section and official solution articles.

At this point in time, we encourage you to solve our most beginner-friendly tree problem and experiment with the tree visualization tool. This problem is intended for those of us with minimal coding experience. If you would like to try a more challenging tree problem, we encourage you to try the infamous Invert Binary Tree problem from the video and return here.

Study Tip: After solving a problem, it's natural to want to move on to the next problem quickly. However, we highly recommend that you check out the discuss section and/or the official solution article, even if you solved the problem with ease.

Most problems can be solved in several ways, and each problem may present a learning opportunity. Compare your solution to others' code and read their explanations. Look for more efficient solutions, look for any data structures or algorithms that you are unfamiliar with, and don't be afraid to expose yourself to code written in other languages.

If you find a more efficient solution, it's excellent practice to solve the problem again from scratch while trying to implement the more efficient solution on your own. If you find a data structure or algorithm that you did not know, check out the explore card, read a few high-quality posts, or search for a study guide for that topic. Most importantly, take that information with you to use the next time you encounter a similar problem!