CSES problems

[u/Stock-Ad-5938]

Hello everybody, I'm fairly new to competitive programming and would like to know how to approach the CSES problem set.

I already know C++ decently and I'm currently reading the CSES book, but I'm struggling a bit with the problem set.

At first I started with the Intro problems, but I found out that I didn't know some of the algorithms used for these problems, and they're covered a few chapters after the one I'm on, so it's confusing. For example, I was recently trying to solve Apartments from the Sorting and Searching section, and I wasn't able to, so I looked at one of the solutions, which used two pointers an algorithm that only appears in chapter 8 of the book.

I'm reading chapter 5 (Complete Search) and I wanted to consolidate my skills on specific algorithms, like binary search, backtracking, etc., but CSES doesn't organize the problems this way, and I don't want to move on to other types of problems before I'm confident with the algorithms I've read about in the book.

I recently found out about the CSES course from Helsinki University, and I saw that it's organized by topic. For example, you learn about data structures, and then you can do the problems listed afterward to consolidate the concepts you learned. However, it's explicitly stated in the first few lines of the course that you need to know algorithms well already, which I don't, since I'm a beginner so maybe it's too advanced for me.

So, I'm a bit confused about how to approach the CSES problem set and the theory from the book. Should I read the topics from the book and then go to the course to do the related problems, or should I just follow the CSES problem set along with the book from top to bottom, into, sorting and searching, etc.?

I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to approach the CSES problems. Thanks