Competitive Programming: Increasing the Lower Bound of Programming Contests

This is a book that every competitive programmer must read – and master, at least during the middle phase of their programming career: when they want to leap forward from ‘just knowing some programming language commands’ and ‘some algorithms’ to become a top programmer.

Typical readers of this book will be: 1). Thousands University students competing in annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) [27] regional contests, 2). Hundreds Secondary or High School Students competing in annual International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) [12], 3). Their coaches who are looking for a comprehensive training materials [9], and 4). Basically anyone who loves problem solving using computer.

Beware that this book is not for a novice programmer. When we wrote the book, we set it for readers who have knowledge in basic programming methodology, familiar with at least one programming language (C/C++/Java), and have passed basic data structures and algorithms (or equivalent) typically taught in year one of Computer Science University curriculum.