Step 2: Identify Practice Problems and Study Materials

Now that you know your focus areas and priorities, you need to get identify and gather your study materials. The main things you want to gather are:

• Reference materials: The textbook or other resource that explains the concepts you're practicing. With textbooks, you can use the chapters/section headings and the index to find the relevant sections. You might also prefer to use videos (Youtube has a lot of good tutorials), as well as any lecture notes you might have from class. Between textbooks, class materials, and materials available online or at a good library, finding enough reference materials probably will not be a problem for you.
• Practice problems and questions: These items will help you to practice for the exam, and will help you get better at the material even if you're not in a course that offers exams and tests. I can honestly say that one of the biggest problems I notice with students is that they don't do enough practice. Just reading through a chapter in a book a few times is not enough.

Finding Sources for Study Material

For both reference materials and practice problems and questions, my first recommendation is to start with whatever sources your class offers. You've probably already got a textbook that gives you both types of study material, as well as access to class notes and practice exams. However, if you need additional materials (particularly practice problems), or if you're not taking a class that provides these materials (most likely for independent learners), I'll give you some advice on other places to look.

Reference Material

As I mentioned, my first suggestion is the class textbook and lecture notes, as well as whatever notes you've taken in class and during previous study sessions. These sources will usually be closest aligned to what will be covered on the tests and exams. Other books or online materials might have a lot of information that's not covered in your class, or may leave out some points.

However, I understand that independent learners might not have official resources available. Even if you're taking a class, sometimes you might feel that the textbook or teacher's notes might not be clear in explaining things, or maybe you need to have things explained in a different way. While I would suggest approaching the teacher or a tutor to help clarify your confusion, there are some other resources you can try. These might include:

• An official class website for previous years' versions of the course: Lots of colleges and universities in particular have archived course websites from previous years, sometimes taught by different instructors, whose approaches might be more helpful in explaining things for you.
• Other textbooks in your library or bookstore: If you're near a public or school library, they usually have some good resources that you can use (and you can save money by going to the library rather than buying another expensive textbook).
• Official documentation: Many programming languages and tools, such as the Java programming language (which many computer science classes use), have good official documentation that explains language features, as well as offering tutorials and coding samples.
• Online resources: There's so many online resources for programming and computer science, that the biggest problem isn't not being able to find any, it's that you might get overwhelmed with all the resources out there. It's as simple as typing in your programming language and topic or question into a search engine. However, some resources aren't always the most accurate, so be careful. Some good sites for multiple programming languages and concepts include freecodecamp.org, beginnersbook.com, and tutorialspoint.com.

Practice Problems and Questions

For practice problems, I recommend many of the same sources as for reference materials. However, I want to emphasize that you should definitely start with previous tests and assignments that you've already done. They'll be closest to the types of material you'll see on the final exams.

Here are some other sites you might want to look at:

• https://adriann.github.io/programming_problems.html
• https://tausiq.wordpress.com/easy-programming-problems-with-solutions/
• https://projecteuler.net/
• http://www.cprogramming.com/challenge.html
• codingbat.com

While some of these sites are geared towards specific programming languages (cprogramming.com focuses on C and C++, and CodingBat offers Python and Java problems), it can still be good practice to try and solve the problems in your language of choice.

More About College Websites

I previously mentioned that a lot of schools have course websites that offer lots of reference and practice materials. I want to talk more about how to find these resources from schools that you don't attend; they can be a great source of learning material, even if you're trying to learn on your own.

Not sure where to start looking? Choose any college or school that you know of, and go to that school’s website. Usually, somewhere on that site is a list of academic programs by subject area or department. Look for the page dedicated to the engineering or computer science department. The site might include a list of class offerings for that semester, as well as links to the class pages. Not all schools will have this information publicly available, but many do.

Here are some class sites to get you started:

• https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/index.htm
• https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-092-java-preparation-for-6-170-january-iap-2006/labs/
• https://chortle.ccsu.edu/cs151/cs151java.html

Again, some of these sites are geared toward specific languages, but you can use the same principle I discussed above to find materials for your language, and again, practice problems can be applied across different languages.