Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual

by Miguel A. Revilla and Steven S. Skiena

A comprehensive training and practice manual for both students and instructors for the prestigious ACM International Computer Programming Contest, USA Computing Olympiad and International Olympiad in Informatics. Over 100 programming problems have been carefully selected and presented to instruct and challenge anyone interested in developing understanding and skills for modern programming techniques.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387001638
• ISBN13: 9780387001630
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Recreational and good for modern job interviews

The problems are fun and I see more and more and more of these kinds of programming problems on job interviews these days so it's good to be quick at doing them. Beware though that problems are collected by the author from various sources and some are in my opinion, poor problem statements and you can fail their robots until you realize some part of the weasel wording in the problems. It's part of a game they play in the contests, which is more what this book is designed for than what I am using it for. On their web site after you pass a problem, you can then work on trying to beat the best time; that's the most fun part for me.

Recommended to practical people

I must say that I bought this book together with "The Algorithm Design Manual" and I'm very satisfied. The problems presented here are challenging for a large category of people interested in algorithm designs and are really well selected from thousands of possible problems. I'm also happy with the sites where you can submit your's solutions to check whether they are correct or not :-)). Take it & enjoy the discovery beauty.

This may not be what you are looking for.

This is a book about problems in programming contests but I feel it is also a introduction to algorithms. An introduction that makes you work out for yourself things that you might expect to have explained to you in a textbook. There are two approaches for preparing yourself as a competitive programmer. One approach involves learning lots of relevant small skills. Later with practice and ability you may be able to put those skills together in truely creative ways. The other approach involves learning some general principles and then practicing problems which apply those principles in more (or less!) obvious ways. I have always preferred the second approach, especially when it done with problems whose solutions are less obvious. Solving such problems forces you to practice what you need need to be a creative problem solver. The authors of this book seem to agree with me. You may not like that. I, of course, do.

Excellent problems for programming challenges

By far, the hardest part of teaching programming classes is evaluating the programs. Unless you have the students do only simplistic programs, they are difficult to read and running the executables does not always give an accurate appraisal of what was done. One possible solution to this educational conundrum is to take advantage of the robot judge maintained at the book's companion web site. The book contains many problems to be solved via a program that must accept inputs having a specific, albeit general format and then produce the appropriate output. The robot judge is capable of evaluating programs written in Pascal, C, C++ and Java and it will return one of eleven different results, all of which are two letter acronyms. If the program is not given a passing grade, then the message will not be of much benefit. The problems are placed in several categories, including sorting, combinatorics, number theory, graph traversal, grid operations and geometry. I identified several that I can and most likely will use as assignments the next time I teach basic programming. While some problems require significant background information, in general it is not so great that it is beyond the bounds of what can be done in a basic computing class. The problems were originally created to prepare students for programming contests, so the level of difficulty is such that they could not be used until later in a beginning course. However, the book would be an excellent text for any advanced programming class where the students are split into teams. Each chapter begins with primer material for the problems given in that chapter and I included it in my best books of the year 2003 column for the online "Journal of Object Technology".

excellent programming manual

It is well known that programming is more of an art than a science. The best way to obtain proficiency in this subject is to try your hand at constructing algorithms for many different problems, and the present book suits this objective admirably. The problems, coming as they do from several programming contests, are very varied, challenging and often humorous. A very important feature concerning this book is that after obtaining a tentative solution, one can try its correctness and efficiency by submitting the program to a web page, where a checking robot will analyze it automatically. The book is very reasonably priced and undoubtely it will belong in the library of every scientific programmer.