“Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.”

-Ellen Ullman

“Practice maketh a man perfect” and same goes for the programmers out there too. Practicing your coding is important to being a developer. Gone are the days where learning to code was reserved for the select few, or cost quite a hefty amount of money. Today you can learn and practice how to code online, entirely for free.

Since the face of every business has now moved online, being able to manipulate what website visitors see and interact with has become treasured. Therefore, learning how to code is no longer just for IT professionals and software engineers. Today, knowing how to program code can be one of the most important skills you can learn that will directly affect career advancement. If you can bring value to your online presence, then you can make a positive and measurable impact on any business.

So if you’re looking out for opportunities to learn new coding skills and/or improving those you already have – here is a list of the best websites to practice coding.

Top Websites To Improve Your Coding Skills In 2019:

1. Github:

GitHub is the world’s leading software development platform and also the largest open-source community. There are over 500 free books on programming that cover over 80 different programming languages on the Git repository hosting service. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.

Advantages:

• Numerous projects available.
• Offers free programming books 
• A large amount of open-source code is present.
• Can be connected with social platforms such as LinkedIn.

2. Codewars:

Codewars provides a large collection of coding challenges submitted and edited by their own community. It’s meant for beginners and intermediate coders and it offers progressive challenges as you advance with your coding skills. Codewars makes learning programming a ton of fun. They offer a points and ranking system as well as the ability to form clans.

Students can choose to learn their desired coding language like C++, Java, JavaScript, Rust, Ruby, SQL, PHP, Swift, TypeScript, Crystal, and more. Students will sharpen their skills by challenging themselves on kata. The kata has been created by the CodeWars community to help strengthen different skills.

Advantages:

• Content on Codewars is plentiful and widely varied.
• Head-to-head comparison.
• Redundant Code Execution.
• Offer a huge repository of challenges in over 20+ different languages.

3.Coderbyte:

CoderByte offers about 200+ coding challenges you can solve in an online editor using 10 different programming languages. There are official solutions to most of the challenges as well as it allows you to view user-submitted solutions.

The challenges vary ranging from easy such as ‘finding the largest word in a string’ to hard ‘print the maximum cardinality matching of a graph’. The website also gives a collection of algorithm tutorials, introductory videos, and interview preparation courses.

Advantages:

• Organizations can sign up and manage their screening process.
• There are hundreds of thousands of user-submitted solutions.
• Coderbyte is great for interview prep.
• It also provides a number of courses in web development and algorithms and data structures as well as some prep courses for coding boot camps.

4. Topcoder:

TopCoder is one of the fundamental platforms for competitive programming online. Topcoder is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers.

It offers a lot of algorithmic challenges that you can complete on your own, direct online using their code editor tool. Topcoder is better suited for an advanced audience.

Advantages:

• They offer sponsored competitions where you can Win Prizes for writing out the best solution.
• Better suited for an advanced audience.
• They offer a lot of editing tutorials on different technologies.
• It also hosts the TopCoder data science tutorials.

5. CodeFights:

CodeFights provides a collection of coding challenges for you to solve in their online editor and there is a forum for users to discuss the challenges. They also have a feature called Company Bots where you write code to compete against a “bot” that was programmed by engineers at companies like Uber, Dropbox, and Quora.

CodeSignal aims to make the Coding Score to become the de facto standard in the developer hiring market. However, developers can choose to share their scores publicly or keep them private until they want to share them with recruiters.

Advantages:

• Focuses more on interview prep and helping businesses recruit developers.
• You can chat with friends or others in the community.
• It also shows on which sample input your code wasn’t right.
• Having solved the challenges or bot challenges you will be awarded points.
• Once you submit your solution, lower your number of character used in a program, higher your leadership position will be.

• It is one of the best competitive coding websites for beginners.

6. Codechef:

CodeChef is an Indian-based competitive programming website that provides hundreds of challenges.  CodeChef is a DirectI initiated Non-profit coding platform which was started in 2009.

Advantages:

• CodeChef has various algorithm tutorials and forum discussions to help those who are new to the world of computer programming.
• You can write code in their online editor.
• They have a large community of coders that contribute to the forum.
•  It hosts programming contests offering prizes worth up to INR 20,000 (for Indian Community), $700 (for Global Community).

7. HackerRank:

HackerRank boasts of about 5 million developers unlocking code challenges comprising four sections of Practice, Compete, Job and Leader board. HackerRank focuses on computer science topics thus, providing challenges for several domains such as Algorithms, Mathematics, SQL, Functional Programming, AI, and more.

Developers can use Java, Python, JavaScript, PHP, C++, and SQL to solve the provided challenges.

Advantages:

• They provide a discussion and leaderboard for every challenge.
• You can solve all the challenge directly online.
• It provides the ability for users to submit applications and apply to jobs by solving company-sponsored coding challenges.
• You’re also placed in the global leaderboard.

8. LeetCode:

LeetCode is great for when you’re on the job hunt. their challenges are a bit more advanced than some other websites since the topics they cover require knowledge of data structures such as binary trees, heaps, linked lists, etc. It offers a Mock Interview section that is specifically there for job interview preparation. The platform provides modern learning, intricate challenges, and a superb dashboard to get it all done.

Advantages:

• They host their own coding contests.
• They have a section for articles to help you better understand certain problems.
• Focuses mainly on intermediate and advanced level coders.
• They have an online judge for the problems as well as the opportunity to participate on mock interviews.

9. CodinGame:

CodinGame offers Games as an interesting way to learn. This website is different than the ones listed above because instead of simply solving coding challenges by producing a set of outputs, on CodinGame you write code to actually play a game online. CodinGame is a new style of learning and is definitely worth checking out.

Advantages:

• The games come with a problem description and test cases, guiding you along.
• It is a great website for beginners to learn coding.
• It focuses on the beginner and intermediate level coders.
• Provides programming challenges through a gamified experience.

10. Project Euler:

Project Euler is a veteran in the competitive coding online challenge space. Project Euler provides a large collection of challenges in the domain of computer science and mathematics. It is a website dedicated to a series of computational problems intended to be solved with computer programs and focuses much more on the more advanced knowledge and you need to have certain mathematics knowledge, as well as some other skills.

However, you cannot directly code on the website in an editor, so you would need to write a solution on your own computer and then provide the solution on their website.

Advantages:

• Project Euler offers a stunning set of good math problems.
• It hosts a forum where people can discuss.
• It helps you with your creative thinking, learning and advancing in the programming language that you’re using.
• The website is simple, which makes it easy to quickly jump in and start practicing.

11. SPOJ:

The SPOJ platform is centered around an online judging system. Sphere Online Judge or SPOJ for shorter is one of the biggest coding challenge libraries online. You are allowed to submit your code in an online editor. It provides you access to a staggering amount of problems prepared by its community of problem setters or taken from previous programming contests.

Advantages:

• SPOJ also allows advanced users to organize contests under their own rules.
• Offers a forum for users to discuss coding challenges.
• You can find solutions for almost every challenge on their discussion boards.
• Contains thousands of problems, organized by tags.

12. GeeksforGeeks:

GeeksforGeeks was formed on March 19th, 2009. Geeks for Geeks offers a wide variety of courses that one can’t easily get from any other websites.  GeeksForGeeks has the best collections of articles, explanations, and code solutions for algorithms and data structure topics and is considered as one of the best online programming platforms.

If you are preparing for a software engineering interview, you should definitely use refer to this website and prepare as well as brush up on the harder algorithm questions.

Languages such as C, C++, Java, Python, SQL, PHP, JavaScript, and school programming can be learned through this website.

Advantages:

• They provide an online editor where you can practice solving challenges yourself before referring to the solution.
• They offer step by step preparation by breaking down a complex question into simpler parts, explaining the solution and then providing a code solution.
• It comes with the basic, easy, medium, hard, and expert knowledge and one can select the option as per its knowledge or choice.

13. CodeForces:

Codeforces is a Russian based competitive programming website which hosts coding contest on a regular basis where competitive programmers from all over the world participate.

Their challenges will most likely be too advanced for beginners. One would definitely learn and improve here tremendously and provides high-quality contests with the highest frequency, sometimes up to twice a week.

Advantages:

•  It features a blog system where you can ask questions and practice too.
•  Every contest they conduct is provided with immediate helpful tutorials (usually) written by the authors themselves.
• Codeforces also has a strong and engaging community.

14. HackerEarth:

HackerEarth is another  Indian company focusing on competitive programming and hiring challenges. HackerEarth is a very well-known name in the programming community that runs hackathons, coding challenges, and various different kinds of competitions. You can find a good amount of the challenges in HackerEarth’s database that can end up being asked in any of your future job interviews and is, therefore, an important website for job hunting.

Advantages:

• HackerEarth provides recruitment solutions to top-notch tech companies.
• It offers enterprise software solutions.
• It hosts competitions conducted by various colleges around India.

15. Timus:

Timus is another famous Online Judge and is also the largest Russian archive of programming problems with automatic judging system. Problems are mostly collected from contests held at the Ural Federal University, Ural Championships, Ural ACM ICPC Subregional Contests, and Petrozavodsk Training Camps.

Advantages:

• Problems are mostly collected from regional contests.
• It has problems classified by type, as well as the regionals they appeared in.
• Timus problems are getting their tests improved on a regular basis.

Conclusion:

The above-listed websites are a great source of to start coding and acquire knowledge to continuously upgrade your programming skills. According to website development experts you can really benefit from registering and becoming involved in their challenges.

Anyone out there looking to improve their programming skills and/or should register on any of the above-mentioned websites and should practice regularly if he wishes to grow as a programmer and compete in the world of programming.