Competitive Programming, 3rd Edition

Preface
This book is a must have for every competitive programmer. Mastering the contents of this book is a necessary (but maybe not sufficient) condition if one wishes to take a leap forward from being just another ordinary coder to being among one of the world’s finest programmers.

Typical readers of this book would include:
1. University students who are competing in the annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) [66] Regional Contests (including the World Finals),
2. Secondary or High School Students who are competing in the annual International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) [34] (including the National or Provincial Olympiads),
3. Coaches who are looking for comprehensive training materials for their students [24],
4. Anyone who loves solving problems through computer programs. There are numerous programming contests for those who are no longer eligible for ICPC, including TopCoder Open, Google CodeJam, Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC), etc.

Prerequisites
This book is not written for novice programmers. This book is aimed at readers who have at least basic knowledge in programming methodology, are familiar with at least one of these programming languages (C/C++ or Java, preferably both), have passed a basic data structures and algorithms course (typically taught in year one of Computer Science university curricula), and understand simple algorithmic analysis (at least the big-O notation). In
the third edition, more content has been added so that this book can also be used as a supplementary reading for a basic Data Structures and Algorithms course.