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A curated list of awesome Competitive Programming, Algorithm and Data Structure resources.
Created with a view to connecting people to information, this list below contains a complete collection of all the fantastic resources I've collected over the course of my 11-year competitive programming career. I hope you'll find it useful :)
A collection of fantastic tutorial blog posts written by Codeforces users. Some intriguing ones include Palindromic Trees, Policy Based Data Structures, and a lot more.
A tutorial website widely used and referenced in the Russian-speaking competitive programming community. Most of the articles of the original site have been translated into English, Google Translate works okay for the remaining ones.
Contains several training pages on its website which are designed to develop one's skills in programming solutions to difficult and varied algorithmic problems at one's own pace.
An international journal focused on the research and practice of professionals who are working in the field of teaching and learning informatics to talented student.
One of the most popular tutorial websites among the Taiwanese competitive programming community. The maintainer for this website spends immense efforts on researching algorithms.
Video Lectures from Codechef's Indian Programming Camp 2016. Lectures given by top competitive programmers like Sergey Kulik, Kevin Charles Atienza and Anudeep Nekkanti. Primarily focused on exploring these concepts by applying them to actual competitive contest problems.
Lectured by Prof. Charles Leiserson (one of the coauthors of Introduction to Algorithms) and Prof. Erik Demaine (a brilliant professor who has made remarkable breakthroughs in data science), the course offers great materials, accompanied by intuitive and comprehensive analyses.
This book contains a collection of relevant data structures, algorithms, and programming tips. It's a well-received book. ... The first edition is free for download (pdf).
This 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.
An absolutely phenomenal book. The contents, organized in a very coherent manner, are nothing short of amazing. ... 培養與鍛鍊程式設計的邏輯腦：世界級程式設計大賽的知識、心得與解題分享 (Chinese Traditional)
Building on what already is the most comprehensive introduction to competitive programming, this enhanced new textbook features new material on advanced topics, such as calculating Fourier transforms, finding minimum cost flows in graphs, and using automata in string problems.
Want to kill it at your job interview in the tech industry? Want to win that coding competition? Learn all the algorithmic techniques and programming skills you need from two experienced coaches, problem setters, and jurors for coding competitions.
Computational geometry emerged from the ?eld of algorithms design and analysis in the late 1970s. It has grown into a recognized discipline with its own journals, conferences, and a large community of active researchers.
Competitive Programming is another tool for software engineers, there are developers that excel in their jobs, but find difficult to answer algorithms questions. If you feel identified with this,then this book can help you improve your problem solving skills.
Books for Algorithms
☆
Name
Description
★★★
Introduction to Algorithms, by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein
Also known as CLRS (taken from name initials), this book is often referred to as the "bible" for algorithms and data structures. It's one of the most popular textbooks for university algorithm courses. This book covered various algorithms and data structures in great detail. The writing is more rigorous and can be difficult to some.
This book revolves around techniques for designing algorithms. It's well-organized and written in a clear, understandable language. Each chapter is backed with practical examples and helpful exercises. The chapter on network flow is highly praised by lots. ... The lecture slides that accompany the textbook are available on its official website.
The book is written in more readable text. Some find it comprehensive than other books. You can also find some good resources (including the author's own video lectures) on its official website.
This book provides a different approach to algorithms, balancing theory with a more practical angle, with a section per-chapter focusing on how to apply algorithms to real-world use cases that can be found in your daily work, or in competitive programming; it also presents a blend of classic, advanced, and new algorithms.
Computational geometry emerged from the ?eld of algorithms design and analysis in the late 1970s. It has grown into a recognized discipline with its own journals, conferences, and a large community of active researchers.
Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne's Algorithms is one of the most popular textbooks on algorithms today and is widely used in colleges and universities worldwide.
Discrete Mathematics is closely relevant to competitive programming. This book provides comprehensive materials on a wide range of topics including: Logics and Proofs, Sets, Functions, Sequences, Matrices, Number Theory, Recursion, Counting, Probability, Graphs, Trees and Boolean Alegra to name but a few.
The book does a brilliant job at bridging the gap between a physical system (for scientists and engineers) and an abstract system (for mathematicians).
Topics in counting and probability byformer USA Mathematical Olympiad winner David Patrick , topics include inclusion-exclusion, 1-1 correspondences, the Pigeonhole Principle, constructive expectation, Fibonacci and Catalan numbers, recursion, conditional probability, generating functions, graph theory, and much more..
Sites for Practice
Good online judge systems / contest platforms to practice.
Codeforces is one of, if not, the most popular contest platforms out there. Currently maintained by Saratov State University, it features regular contests and countless awesome original problems. Additionally, every contest provides immediate helpful tutorials (usually) written by the authors themselves. Codeforces also houses a strong and engaging community. All in all, one would indeed learn and improve tremendously here.
Topcoder has been around since 2001. Rich in history, It's considered to be one of the most prestigious organizations when it comes to technology competitions. Hundreds of SRMs gave birth to an abundant problemset. Problems here are typically more challenging than others and Topcoder therefore appeals to many elite programmers. The annual Topcoder Open (TCO) is also a widely-discussed event.
Google Code Jam is certainly one of the most highly-esteemed programming competitions. The competition consists of unique programming challenges which must be solved in a fixed amount of time. Competitors may use any programming language and development environment to obtain their solutions.
CodeChef is a non-profit educational initiative of Directi. It's a global competitive programming platform and has a large community of programmers that helps students and professionals test and improve their coding skills. Its objective is to provide a platform for practice, competition and improvement for both students and professional software developers. Apart from this, it aims to reach out to students while they are young and inculcate a culture of programming in India.
The SPOJ platform is centered around an online judge system. It holds a staggering amount of problems prepared by its community of problem setters or taken from previous programming contests, some of which are great problems for practice (refer to the Problem classifiers section). SPOJ also allows advanced users to organize contests under their own rules.
Timus Online Judge is the largest Russian archive of programming problems with automatic judging system. Problems are mostly collected from contests held at the Ural Federal University, Ural Championships, Ural ACM ICPC Subregional Contests, and Petrozavodsk Training Camps.
Aizu online judge is a contest platform and problem archive hosted by The University of Aizu. It has a lot of great problems from programming competitions in Japan.
An old-school problem archive / online judge with rich history. Thousands of problems, including many classic ones, are featured here. However, it is strongly advised that you practice with uHunt following its "Competitive Programming Exercise" section.
HackerRank is a company that focuses on competitive programming challenges for both consumers and businesses. HackerRank's programming challenges can be solved in a variety of programming languages and span multiple computer science domains.
POJ is an online judge with many great problems maintained by Peking University. Most Chinese competitive programmers began their journey here. The platform is really dated so mysterious compilation and run-time issues may occur.
COJ is hosted by University of Informatics Sciences (UCI, by its acronym in Spanish), located in Cuba. Feature ACM ICPC and Progressive contest styles, mostly from Caribbean and Latin American problem setters, also has problem classifier and contest calendar.
New in the competitive programming scene, CS Academy is a growing online judge that hosts competitions once every two weeks. It supports live chat, interactive lessons and an integrated online editor (that actually works).
Programming competitions powered by Mail.Ru Group. Competition consists of 3 qualification, 1 elimination and 1 final rounds. For each round contestants are given 4-8 problems which must be solved in a fixed amount of time.
CodeFights is a website for competitive programming practice and interview preparation. It features daily challenges of varying difficulty, an archive of problems and regular (every 15 minutes) mini-tournaments. Good for beginners.
Problem Classifiers
Sites classifying programming problems.
Choose a category (eg. DP) of interest and practice problems on that topic.
CodeLibrary contains a large collection of implementations for algorithms and data structures in Java and C++. You may also visit his GitHub Repository.
A phenomenally organized, documented and tested team notebook from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. One of the most well-crafted team notebooks (contest libraries) I've ever seen.
Stanford's team notebook is well maintained and the codes within are of high-quality.
★★☆
ngthanhtrung23/ACM_Notebook_new, by team RR Watameda (I_love_Hoang_Yen, flashmt, nguyenhungtam) from National University of Singapore
RR Watameda represented National University of Singapore for the 2016 ACM-ICPC World Finals. The items in this notebook are pretty standard and well-organized.
★★☆
bobogei81123/bcw_codebook, by team bcw0x1bd2 (darkhh, bobogei81123, step5) from National Taiwan University
bcw0x1bd2 represented National Taiwan University for the 2016 ACM-ICPC World Finals. This notebook contains robust implementations for advanced data structures and algorithms.
A Java library for contests written by Alexey Dergunov (dalex). ArrayList, ArrayDeque, Heap, Sort, HashSet, HashMap, TreeSet, TreeMap, TreeList and pair classes are implemented
Vim is one of the most popular text editors among advanced programmers. It allows text-editing to be done very efficiently with solely keystrokes. Vim is also highly configurable, extensible and integrates with shells (command lines) really well. The only setback about Vim is that it has a high learning curve for beginners.
Emacs is another popular text editor (or development environment to be more precise). The debate on "Vim vs. Emacs" is constantly brought up due to their popularity. Basically Emacs is more than just a text editor. It has plugins like file managers, web browsers, mail clients and news clients that allows users to performs these tasks directly inside Emacs. Emacs is "heavier" because of this, but it arguably has a relatively easier learning curve for beginners.
Far Manager is the most widely-used editor in the RU/CIS competitive programming community. It's actually a file manager in its bare bones, but you can install FarColorer - a syntax highlighter plugin to program on it. Properly configured, Far Manager allows you to navigate between files very efficiently while writing your codes.
Code::Blocks is the go-to IDE for C/C++. It's a full-fledged, versatile IDE with numerous great features. Code::Blocks is usually provided along with Vim in programming contests.
IntelliJ IDEA is certainly one of the best IDEs for Java. It's used by most competitive programmers who use Java as their main language. Be sure to check out CHelper, a very handy plugin written for programming contests.
Sublime Text is an extraordinary text editor. Packed with powerful and innovative features like Multiple Carets, Minimaps and Command Palletes, it attracts a strong and engaging community. Sublime Text is highly extensible, so be sure to have Package Control installed and explore perhaps one of the largest catalogue of plugins!
Eclipse is another good IDE for Java. It's an okay alternative to Intellij IDEA (A tad inferior to IDEA by today's standards). Sometimes contests only provide Eclipse for some reason, so this might be a good incentive to try and use Eclipse.
CLion, produced by JetBrains - the same company who made Intellij IDEA, is a powerful IDE for C++. Free educational licenses are available OR you can try out their EAP (Early Access Program) which is still free as of Apr, 2018. You may want to turn off its code inspection feature as it will cause quite a bit of lag.
★☆☆
Other IDEs
Mixed
Visual Studio is the IDE to use in case you want to code in C#. ... Both Atom and Visual Studio Code are built with Electron (written in JavaScript) and therefore somewhat resource-hogging. ... CodeLite is a newly rising IDE. Beware that the load-up and project-creation times can be extraordinary.
A website featuring a large collection of visualization tools for algorithms and data structures.
★★★
General Practice Helpers: ... CHelper (IntelliJ IDEA) (manual) ... caide (Visual Studio, CodeLite, standalone command line app) ... JHelper (AppCode, CLion) online-judge-tools (Stand alone CLI tool, It is actively maintained.)
Great tools that parse contests, inline library codes and provide testing frameworks. They save you from spending your precious time on switching windows and copy-pasting back and forth.
A stunning encyclopedia with a database of countless integer sequences. It also features a powerful search engine. Sometimes a seemingly difficult combinatorics problem could be equivalent to a simple or studied integer sequence.
Very handy for creating slides or team notebooks with pretty, formatted code snippets. Just copy the highlighted code snippets and paste them in your favorite WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor!
A platform that provides expected outputs for user-specified inputs to problems on the UVa Online Judge. Some problems also provide additional test cases for debugging.
Organizer of IPSC and IOI. CS Teacher at Comenius University in Slovakia. Algorithm and CS Education Researcher. Former highly-rated competitive programmer.