Competitive Programmer's Handbook

written by Antti Laaksonen

The purpose of this book is to give the reader a thorough introduction to competitive programming. The book is especially intended for students who want to learn algorithms and possibly participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) or in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

Download the book (PDF)

A more comprehensive printed book Guide to Competitive Programming has now been published. It is based on this online book, but also discusses more advanced topics such as suffix arrays, treaps, dynamic programming optimization, and parallel binary search. You can buy the book, for example, through Springer or Amazon.

Table of contents

Part 1: Basic techniques

1. Introduction
2. Time complexity
3. Sorting
4. Data structures
5. Complete search
6. Greedy algorithms
7. Dynamic programming
8. Amortized analysis
9. Range queries
10. Bit manipulation

Part 2: Graph algorithms

11. Basics of graphs
12. Graph traversal
13. Shortest paths
14. Tree algorithms
15. Spanning trees
16. Directed graphs
17. Strong connectivity
18. Tree queries
19. Paths and circuits
20. Flows and cuts

Part 3: Advanced topics

21. Number theory
22. Combinatorics
23. Matrices
24. Probability
25. Game theory
26. String algorithms
27. Square root algorithms
28. Segment trees revisited
29. Geometry
30. Sweep line algorithms