Competitive programming for beginners

The Further Steps – Contesting And Continuing Practice – Competitive Programming last part of series If you have followed the first three parts of the series, you’d now be very well acquainted with the world of Competitive Programming. By now, you’d have started competing already. So, what are the further steps you can take to become a kickass competitive coder? – Contest in all the contests that you come across – Continue the practice in various online judges Regarding the contest, here are the most popular places you can contest online. 1. Topcoder Topcoder is the best and the most popular online judge with respect to contests. They have a variety of contests going on every now and then. Their SRMs are the most popular ones. There are various categories of contests, and more so, the prize for the contest winner is money. Practicing with past SRMs and contesting in the new SRMs whenever they conduct these matches, in Topcoder especially, will give you a great edge...

Practice Guidance For Competitive Programming – Competitive Programming Series Part-3 If you haven’t read the first two parts of this series, you can read them from below posts. This part will lead you with the next step in your programming journey. This is the part where you actually start practicing problem-solving, competitive programming style. The following is the way I have found to be the most effective. 1. spoj.com The first step in your competitive programming practice, for it to be the most effective, choose these two websites. SPOJ is the best and the leading forerunner in terms of programming contest style questions. Their online judge is awesome. SPOJ engine is also used by CodeChef. The way to practice problems is this. You have to sort the problems in descending order of number of users who solved a problem. If it helps, here is the link for that – http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/sort=6 – bookmark it. Also, go and check out ProjectEuler. Cr...

Problem Solving Using Algorithms and Data Structures – Competitive Programming Part-2 This part will deal with the next step in your journey – starting to solve problems using data structures and algorithms. There are many ways to do this. I have personally found going through a few things very apt in this process. This part will give you a step by step guidance. Once you have started learning algorithms and data structures, do it this way for the most effective experience. Learn algorithms according to a category, like sorting, searching, stacks, queues, etc,. Geeks For Geeks: Once you learn the data structure/algorithms in a particular category, head over to  Geeks For Geeks – Data Structure Problems . Solve all the problems in the category of data structures/algorithms that you have learned. Say, you learn all about stacks, stack operations. You then head over to geeksforgeeks and solve all the problems listed under stack. Before seeing the so...