Guide to Competitive Programming

This invaluable textbook presents a comprehensive introduction to modern competitive programming. The text highlights how competitive programming has proven to be an excellent way to learn algorithms, by encouraging the design of algorithms that actually work, stimulating the improvement of programming and debugging skills, and reinforcing the type of thinking required to solve problems in a competitive setting. The book contains many “folklore” algorithm design tricks that are known by experienced competitive programmers, yet which have previously only been formally discussed in online forums and blog posts. has worked as a teacher and researcher at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University, Finland. He has served as one of the organizers of the Finnish Olympiad in Informatics since 2008, and as the Scientific Chair of the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics in 2016. He has also coached and led the Finnish team at several international programming contests, including the International Olympiad in Informatics 2009–2016, and has established experience in teaching programming and algorithms.​