Resources

 What are the right resources to study from?

I get this question from everyone and honestly, there are no right set of resources for everyone.

Find out what resources/books/lectures/notes work for you. What worked for me, will not necessarily work for you. Often, I would have to study a concept from multiple resources. There is no single book for ANY subject that will help you clear GATE.

I mentioned some books and resources that I used during my preparation, that doesn't mean you have to use the same books, it's all up to you. But Do not ignore Standard books.

That being said, here are the resources that I used.

I got the AppliedGate course in the scholarship test in Oct 2020. I referred to some subjects from that and found it very useful for me, especially Engg. maths, COA, DSA, and later used this course for revision. It helped me to fill my conceptual gaps.

How to follow standard books?

Programming & DS - 

The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. I think no book is enough for this, you have to practice on any platform. The only way to get better at this is to code. Code a lot.

Algorithms -  

Introduction to Algorithms, by CLRS, it's not easy to read this book if you are a noob. 

ALGORITHMS by Dasgupta Papadimitriou Vazirani. This is one of the amazing books on algorithm.

AppliedGate lectures,

Algorithms lectures by Abdul bari

Algorithms by Shai Simonson.

MIT 6.046J - Design and Analysis of Algorithms

Database - 

Database System Concepts by Korth

Fundamentals of Database Systems by Navathe

Gate Book

Normalization by gatecse

Computer Networks - 

Data Communication and Networking by Forouzan

Computer Networks by Tanenbaum

RFC for some topics

Neso academy youtube

RBR youtube lectures

Operating System - 

Operating System Concepts by Galvin

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Remzi and Andrea (highly recommended this book)

Udacity course on Virtual Memory

NPTEL lectures.

Prof Mythili (IIT B) for synchronization.

Multi level Paging by Arjun Sir

TOC - 

An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata by Peter Linz

Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser ( decidability and problem solving)

Rice theorem by gatecse

TOC by Shai Simonson

Easy theory

Neso academy

Decidability discussion by Arjun Sir

Lectures on Decidability by Deepak Poonia Sir

Read all answers and blogs of Deepak Poonia sir & Arjun Sir on GO.

CD - 

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Ullman

Compiler Design - gatecse

viable-prefixes-and-handle-in-lr-parsing/

NPTEL lectures

DLD - 

Neso academy

Digital Design by Morris Mano. (Not required, as it wasn't too complicated subject)

COA - 

It is the most annoying subject for Gate aspirants. But believe me, once you understand it will become one of the easiest and scoring subjects.

AppliedGate lectures.

Read all discussions on GO by Arjun sir, Bikram sir, and other seniors. 

Computer Organization and Architecture by William Stallings

Computer Organization and Embedded Systems by Carl Hamacher.

Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy.

CS-224 Computer Organization

Summer School on Computer Architecture

Discrete maths - 

Indian version of Rosen

AppliedGate lectures.

Gatebook

A good resource for Generating functions

Probability - 

AppliedGate lectures.

Sets, Counting, and Probability by Harvard University

MIT 6.041

Linear algebra - 

AppliedGate lectures,

18-06-linear-algebra

Essence of linear algebra

Calculus - 

AppliedGate lectures.

Essence of calculus

Graph theory - 

Graph theory by Dr. Sarada Herke

Graph Theory by Dr. L. Sunil Chandran (IISc)

Lectures by Deepak Poonia

Notes from Standard books(by Manu Thakur sir)

What test series did I use?

I had given very few tests in my attempt in 2020 and I knew that was a weakness of mine. This year I think to buy multiple test series, but I enrolled in only 2 test series - GateOverflow and AppliedGate.

GateOverflow –

I have to explain anything about it ?? ( Naam hi kafi hai :p ). Gateoverflow is the closest mock test we can get, as compared to the 2021 Gate CS standard. The level of questions is as close as one can get to the real gate paper. I learned few new things which I didn't prepare for earlier. certainly, this was beneficial for the exam.

The MSQ was well framed and mostly are conceptual same as the Gate CSE 2021 paper, and the number of MSQ was the same as the Gate paper.

My only concern is that not many people know about this platform, and so the competition is not much in the test series to gauge our preparation I recommended the GO test series to everyone.

AppliedGate –

As I was an enrolled student, I got access to all practice tests and the GATE 2020 and GATE 2021 test series. So, I got enough standard questions to practice. They had a lot of new questions, and other questions were variations of what was usually present in textbooks or university assignments.  All India Mock tests helped me to get a sense of competition.

Even though this year my main focus was on PYQs not on only giving mocks.

Other than the test series, where did I solve problems from?

You can import my bookmarks. Here you will find many assignments/lectures/question papers of various universities.

As mentioned already, I used to solve problems from assignments, textbooks, and exams, etc.

"Trust GateOverflow - especially with previous year's questions. Almost all other sources have errors in them."

I solved GO book 3-4 times till Dec 20, For me solving TIFR questions was not an easy task. I always find it difficult to solve these.

I also solved exercises from textbooks not completely only which I thought was relevant to GATE exam and also solved assignment of universities(You can easily find on Google).