There are many distinct pleasures associated with computer programming. Craftsmanship has its quiet rewards, the satisfaction that comes from building a useful object and making it work. Excitement arrives with the flash of insight that cracks a previously intractable problem. The spiritual quest for elegance can turn the hacker into an artist. There are pleasures in parsimony, in squeezing the last drop of performance out of clever algorithms and tight coding.
The games, puzzles, and challenges of problems from international programming competitions are a great way to experience these pleasures while improving your algorithmic and coding skills. This book contains over 100 problems that have appeared in previous programming contests, along with discussions of the theory and ideas necessary to attack them. Instant online grading for all of these problems is available from two WWW robot judging sites. Combining this book with a judge gives an exciting new way to challenge and improve your programming skills.
This book can be used for self-study, for teaching innovative courses in algorithms and programming, and in training for international competition.
The problems in this book have been selected from over 1,000 programming problems at the Universidad de Valladolid online judge. The judge has ruled on well over one million submissions from 27,000 registered users around the world to date. We have taken only the best of the best, the most fun, exciting, and interesting problems available.
Studying the challenges of problems from international programming competitions is an effective way to improve your algorithmic and coding skills and understanding.
This new programming companion uses international programming competition-type problems to motivate the study of algorithms, programming, and other topics in computer science. The book includes more than 100 programming challenges, as well as the theory and key concepts necessary for approaching them. Problems are organized by topic and supplemented by complete tutorial material. Readers gain a concrete understanding of both algorithmic techniques and advanced coding topics.
Unique features:
- Offers a wealth of programming problems suitable for self-study―all with online judging at www.programming-challenges.com
- Presents practice training for all the major programming contents―ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC), International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and Topcoder Challenge
- Serves as a convenient, web-based means for adding a programming component to any algorithms or software engineering course
- Contains complete working code for fundamental data structures and graph, string, numerical, and geometric algorithms
- Provides a brief-yet-thorough treatment of key elements of number theory, geometry, dynamic programming, and graph algorithms
- Supports all popular programming languages (C, C++, Pascal, Java)
