Introductory Competitive Programming Workshop

Talk

On 23rd October 2020, we held a virtual workshop for beginners to competitive programming, run by Cambridge ICPC coaches. This introduced the hobby, as well as demonstrating some essential ideas which all competitors should be familiar with. The talk can be found on YouTube:

Contest

Link

Following the talk, we held an introductory contest on Hackerrank, including problems that were solved within that talk, as well as some other accessible yet challenging tasks.

Other Resources

Learning Material

  • Competitive Programmer’s Handbook, Antti Laaksonen - a useful and well-written introduction, but probably best to skim read the first few chapters.
  • Competitive Programming 3/4, Steven Halim, Felix Halim, Suhendry Effendy - a comprehensive guide to the basics of competitive programming.
  • VisuAlgo, Steven Halim - algorithm visualisations to accompany the book.

Online Judges

As with anything, the best way to improve is practice, and regular online contests are a fun and effective way to do this.

  • Codeforces - the biggest, regular contests, rating system
  • AtCoder - high quality contests at several levels (beginner, regular, grand contests)
  • Kattis - irregular contests but has more ICPC style contests, e.g two past UKIEPCs and 2007- NWERCs