First of all, do not say that you want to crack GATE.

Cracking GATE is very difficult- there are

more than 100,000 people trying to do it and only about 2000 seats including NITs. But if you
study your Bachelor subjects in the right way, GATE will automatically come to you. No extra
preparation is needed. Take a look at GATE syllabus, note down the important ones, and note
down the important topics in them. For those subjects at least, use Standard text books,
understand the topics well by doing practice problems at the end of the chapters (like doing
exercises in Cormen). You live in Google era, every topic is just a click away. So, there is no
excuse for saying teachers in college are bad. With one click you can get MIT lectures or NPTEL
lectures. For doubt clearance, there are GATE Overflow, fb groups, Stack Overflow etc. So,
everything is there for you. Those who use them will be far ahead of others. So, all the best for
you. I hope you do not need to crack GATE at the end of 4 years. Wish you shall just walk

through it

Preparing for GATE while doing Bachelors

Most of the classes in Engineering colleges might be below standard. But now you can learn
from the best lectures around the world. Subscribe to these playlists and Courses given by the
best in the world and get the real knowledge.

If you are a bachelor student, see GATE syllabus, identify your Bachelor subjects which are
relevant for GATE and do them properly. After studying those from standard books (never use
local author book as your knowledge will be corrupted) those portions, practice previous GATE
questions (without looking at the solution). Also, try top lectures and courses for all important
subjects. A common mistake is to ignore mathematics, aptitude, and programming – but this is
suicidal. Do, programming a lot- because they make the concepts stronger (not copying
programs but implementing algorithms on your own). Similarly, mathematics – especially
discrete mathematics, and aptitude fetch a lot of marks for GATE as they are applied even in
other subject questions. Kenneth Rosen for Discrete Mathematics and Cormen for Algorithms
are 2 must be followed books.

Some common mistakes:

1. Going for easy materials — easy materials might not be correct or complete and this
will reflect in your GATE rank. You can see some of the blogs by previous toppers, and
see what resources they followed — they will be standard books and previous GATE
questions. Never get fooled by propaganda by coaching institutes — they use it to get
money from you, use it to facilitate the toppers and thus to get more people like you.
Some of them even run paid PR campaigns in social media — well those with common

sense know what to follow, but other people are a lot and they are the fish
2. Coaching — please can see this post
3. Studying solutions — in GATE there will be a lot of new questions and so there is
practically no use even if you carry with you the entire previous year solutions
 4. Wrong GATE materials — yes, these are abundant. Once I saw a GATE material — do
not know the name of the institute — but it was horrible. At least a mistake in every line
of text. Still, many ignorant students follow such materials — simply due to the word
“GATE” in it and they find it easy to by heart. Such people won’t even get 30 marks in
GATE. Telling again — GATE syllabus, previous year questions, standard books
and standard videos are self-sufficient to top GATE.
5. Studying without thinking — While studying you should ask questions like “why” and
“how”. Never believe anything just because some teacher told it. Then only you
understand concepts. Programming is an alternate way to solidify concepts. GO
classroom is where you can find programming questions relevant for GATE CSE.
6. GATE CSE exam is where 99% of the takers fail to get a good rank. Still, this exam is
way easy than say IIT-JEE because most aspirants are preparing the wrong way. So be
careful in listening to others.
7. If you believe you are correct and others around you are wrong, you might be right. But,
to top GATE you have to beat quality people and not just those around you. So you can
help others, but first, help yourself.

Taking Advises
I have been with GATE students for about 3 years now. The worst thing they do is to take advice
from seniors or from friends/relatives who have no good knowledge about GATE. Ideally, one
should never take advice from those who have not got a top 100 rank or those who have spent
enough time for GATE. I can say this from my personal experience- my advice 3 years before
would have been much different from what I say now. Some must avoid things for a good rank:

1. Never prepare for GATE by practicing questions from substandard materials like <ABC>
test booklet or any similar test booklet. Why? Because they are not prepared by proper
faculty (not even by those who teaches in coaching institutes) and have plenty of typing
as well as conceptual mistakes. More over there are lots and lots of previous years
GATE/TIFR/CMI/ISI questions which are way better than any questions that are being
provided by any coaching center.
2. Never pick and choose for GATE study. Anything in the syllabus is important. You have
to ensure >75% marks to be safe in GATE. For this you have to follow your study
properly and while practicing tests ensure that scoring is consistently over 70. If not
identify what your problem is and fix it soon. Just do not wait and just pray for luck in
GATE. There is NO difficult portion in GATE worth skipping.
3. GATE is a competitive exam. Never feel happy with what your friends or fellow
aspirants say regarding any solution. You must be good enough to know if a solution is
correct or not. I have seen 3 types of people –
1. Those who identify fault in their solution quickly
2. Those who follow what the majority says
3. Those who follow what they believe and never changes them

As expected most of the GATE toppers belong to category 1 and the other 2 really
struggle however hard they prepare.
Important Topics for GATE
These can also be identified by seeing the Topic listings of the GO pdf.

C, DS & Algorithms

This is the most important subject according to GATE point of you. Approximately 25%
Questions in Gate come from above topics and all are related with each other. If you are good in
this subject this will not only help you in GATE but also after it in so many written exams and
interviews of Different IITs and IIITs.

C programming Questions are mostly based on finding outputs which contain some pointers,
static variables, arrays, strings, functions etc. There won’t be questions which are dependent on
library functions – like return value of printf, various format specifiers etc. and also those on
compiler dependent and undefined behaviour parts.

Understand Different Problems on Stack, Queue, Link List. Generally they come in a C program.
But you can solve them only if you know the logic – try implementing stack using queues and
vice-versa. Properties of Heap. Deletion and insertion of items in the heap.

Practice Tree problems like no of leaf nodes, non leaf nodes, total nodes, height of the tree, no of
full nodes, mirror image, etc. AVL tree and balancing them on insertion and Deletion. Binary
tree, Binary Search Tree, Inorder, Preorder, Postorder traversal. Spanning Trees, Minimum
Spanning Tree problems.

Finding Complexity : Very Important Topic. You need to practice more and with every problem
you solved. Sometimes direct question comes related to complexity like give complexity of Heap
sort. But mostly you are given a code or question. You need to find best average case complexity
of that problem. So try to find complexity of every algorithm or program which you practice.
Also understand properties of complexity. Sometimes relation between them is asked.

Searching and Sorting Problems. Difference between Different Techniques and how to apply
them on different real life problems.

Questions on approach of dynamic programming, Divide and Conquer, Greedy and Brute Force.
Practice basic problems like quick sort, merge sort, knapsack problem, matrix chain
multiplication, LCS, Job sequencing, Compressing Mechanism. It will help you to solve other
tricky problems.

Basic Theory of P-NP class

Operating System
Syllabus : Processes, Threads, Inter-process communication, Concurrency, Synchronization,
Deadlock, CPU scheduling, Memory management and virtual memory, File systems, I/O
systems, Protection and security.

Important Points :

 Scheduling : Numerical Questions have more chances. Practice more in finding turn
around time and waiting time of different scheduling policies.
 Deadlock : Bankers Algo, Given Sequence is safe or not. Chances of common data or
linked questions.
 Synchronization : High Probability Of Questions in exam. Practice some question related
to semaphores and classical problems of synchronization (this will help you to solve
other questions)
 Memory Management : Questions generally comes from page table size, number of
pages, logical address, physical address, page size, inverted page table, virtual memory,
TLB etc.

Theory Of Computation :

Syllabus : Regular languages and finite automata, Context free languages and Push-down
automata, Recursively enumerable sets and Turing machines, Undecidability.

Important Points :

 Finite Automata covers approximately 50% questions from TOC. So give it more time
then others. Do questions related to finding minimum number of states, NFA to DFA
conversion, Closure Properties of finite automata, Finding Regular Expressions,mealy
moore machine etc.
 In Context free grammar practice more on simplification of CFG, pushdown automata,
closure properties etc.
 Do problems on finding category of any language or grammar.
 Concepts related to expressive power of different languages.
 Basic problems related to NP-Completeness. Properties of Recursive and Recursive
Enumerable Languages.
 Turing Machine making and expressive power of different type of turing machine. ( also
useful for interview )

Compiler Design

Important Points :

 Parsing : there is always a question related to parsing. You need to practice all parsing
technique because there is also chances for linked questions. finding first and follow,
LL(1)-LR(1)-SLR-LALR-CLR.
 Precedence and Associativity of operators.
 Finding value from expression tree.
  Ambiguous grammar.

Databases

Important Points :

 No gate paper completed without Normalization. This is very easy once you understand
and can solve questions quickly. Questions are like Finding normal form ( comes 70%
times in gate paper ), finding candidate keys, decomposition of relation, loss less join and
dependency preservation have more probability to come.
 SQL Queries also asked in the paper. Practice select clause properly with properties of
having,group by, any ,all, exits. Question may come with relational algebra in common
data section.
 Practice joins because there is more probability of tricky questions from them.
 Finding View and Conflict serializability. Finding Recoverable and Cascade
schedule.lock based, Two phase, time stamp and graph based protocol with there
properties like deadlock freedom, starvation freedom.
 formation and structure of B and B+ tress. primary and clustering index. Numerical
Questions from no of block required in indexing of different type, collision resolution,
minimum and maximum no of nodes in B,B+ trees.

Digital Logic

Syllabus : Logic functions, Minimization, Design and synthesis of combinational and sequential
circuits; Number representation and computer arithmetic (fixed and floating point).

Important Points :

 Digital logic contains very simple questions. If you practice and use your brain in a right
way you can do them easily.
 Practice K-Map. very high chances of very simple question. Don’t loose your marks here.
 Practice Multiplexer, De-multiplexer, Encoder, Decoder questions.
 Understand concept of flip flop. They are given and modulus of counter is asked.
 Practice questions related to Floating Point representation, integer representation, ieee
format, range and precision.

Computer Organization and Architecture

Syllabus : Machine instructions and addressing modes, ALU and data-path, CPU control design,
Memory interface, I/O interface (Interrupt and DMA mode), Instruction pipelining, Cache and
main memory, Secondary storage.

Important Points :

 Addressing Modes : Theory and questions

  Numerical related to program counter after some instruction, no of one address-two
address instructions, Values after shift and rotate instructions, horizontal and vertical
programming related questions.
 Numerical Problems on Speed up of pipeline, time taken to complete instruction in
pipeline and non-pipeline architectures, Hazards in pipeline, hazards removal, branch
penalty etc.
 Numerical Problems on cache memory organization, mapping technique, multilevel
caches, write through and write back technique
 Questions are more tricky in this subject. So you need to practice more on different types
of Numerical Questions.

Computer Network

Syllabus : ISO/OSI stack, LAN technologies (Ethernet, Token ring), Flow and error control
techniques, Routing algorithms, Congestion control, TCP/UDP and sockets, IP(v4), Application
layer protocols (icmp, dns, smtp, pop, ftp, http); Basic concepts of hubs, switches, gateways, and
routers. Network security – basic concepts of public key and private key cryptography, digital
signature, firewalls.

Important Points :

 Addressing related questions : Subnet address, supernet address, brodcast address, range
of network, no of host, classless addressing, non continuous addresses, first host and last
host finding etc.
 Properties Of Circuit Switching and packet switching, Routing Protocols and Numerical
Problems on them.
 Flow Control and Error Control Policies. Numerical Problems on Window Size, No Of
Sequence bits, frame size, bandwidth, round trip time, utilization, Hamming Distance,
CRC. Congestion Control policies like slow start, congestion avoidence and Congestion
Detection.
 IP Header , TCP and UDP header format, theory related to Ethernet and token ring.
 Basics Of Different Type of protocols like : FTP, HTTP, DHCP, ARP, RARP, SMTP,
ICMP,POP
 Basic Concepts of Cryptography and firewalls.