Ebook: Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual

Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, known to professors, students, and developers worldwide as the "Dragon Book," is available in a new edition.  Every chapter has been completely revised to reflect developments in software engineering, programming languages, and computer architecture that have occurred since 1986, when the last edition published.  The authors, recognizing that few readers will ever go on to construct a compiler, retain their focus on the broader set of problems faced in software design and software development Getting started -- Data structures -- Strings -- Sorting -- Arithmetic and algebra -- Cominatorics --Number theory -- Backtracking -- Graph Traversal -- Graph algorithms -- Dynamic programming -- Grids -- Geometry -- Computational geometry

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This book provides programming challenges from UVa in a topical manner which is a nice way to study certain topics; it provides some helpful hints on the challenges. The only shortcomings come in the preparation to the programming challenges, I felt they were rushed and not very complete, true you could easily write a couple thousand pages on the topics covered, but I thought there should at least be a complete algorithm breakdowns to the problems presented, I'm not talking about code, but at least some approaches. Example, in chapter 2 there is a 5 page (plus or minus) introduction to containers (mainly stacks) and then several challenging problems that didn't necessarily require the review the book just presented. For the most part this is a very helpful book when I was preparing for the ICPC, but could have been a little better.