I can not solve task N what should I do?
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What do you advise to those, who are struggling with some task and can't solve it: think more and solve everything yourself (otherwise you are cheater) or google it/read some books? If you choose the second answer and it's not just googling, what books (articles, blogs, etc.) would you advise? Thank you in advance.
There's nothing wrong with using a search engine, or book, to look for ways to solve a problem. It's only cheating if you copy someone else's code and pretend that you wrote it. If you are stuck on a problem, firstly I'd suggest looking on this forum to see if anyone else has had difficulty as that may help you.
Georgy, Hi!
Thanks for your question! It is really interesting :)
I think both variants are good, depending on your goal. For example some tasks could rely on whimsical algorithm which is really not needed to be known for normal programmer - such tasks are safe to be skipped at all. :)
In other cases it may happen that if you postpone the task and solve some other, and return to it later, you will have more experience/ideas to struggle with it. It is an often case as the problems are not in "strict" order of increasing difficulty.
As for googling or books - it may help to start searching through the forums on this site (the search box in the header may be helpful in this). As for books it is hard to advice since the problems often are on different topics - some on general algorithms, some about math, some are just programming puzzles.
Concluding I just say that some of the problems here took long enough time for me myself - for I also need to solve them before adding to the list. So it is just normal :)