Hi,
I am currently learning from Ace the Coding Interview.
This course has questions on several data structures and algorithms.
The structure of the article is
- Question
- Hint
- Try it yourself
- Multiple solutions
If I try to check the method contract for practicing the problem on my own, I have to scroll through the hint each time. Even if I don’t intend to get the hint now I will get a glimpse of it while scrolling to Try It yourself section and would catch a keyword wrt to the problem (eg recursion, stack, backtracking etc).
Now it might be obvious that the question would need a particular data structure and the hint does not ruin the problem-solving aspect, but sometimes the use of a data structure might not be so obvious. Or there could be multiple ways to solving a problem, but now since we saw a particular hint even without thinking about the problem at first we might be biased to find a solution based on the hint.
This might sound very trivial but can the hint be placed after the “try it section”, so that people scroll to the hint only if they are not able to solve the problem on their own.