brabble is a crash course in competitive programming held at Imperial College London as part of the 1st year Advanced Programming Lectures.
We go over basic approaches to solve problems which are selected from an online judge. We use Java and Python.
There is a lot of great material on competitive programming:
- The UVA Online Judge has a massive problem collection
- Use uhunt to keep track of interesting problems to solve
- codeforces and TopCoder provide a host of real-time online programming contests (often thousands of contestants) so are a great way to gain some contest experiences
- You will also find it useful to read about Java Collections API
A few books you will definitely find useful:
-
Introduction to Algorithms, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald Rivest, Thomas H. Cormen, and Clifford Stein
-
Competitive Programming, Steven Halim, Felix Halim
-
The Algorithm Design Manual, Steven Skiena
| Week | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 | Background and Implementation Problems |
| 2 | Complete Search |
| 3 | Divide and Conquer |
| 4 | Greedy, Dynamic Programming |
| 5, 6 | Graphs |
| 7 | Geometry |
| 8 | Maths |
There is a directory for each week in which you will find:
- slides for the lecture
- templates for the problems to get you started quickly
- solutions (usually tested on an online judge)
Use the provided solution if you get stuck, but try spending at least 15 mins before resorting to such drastic measures... :)