Hi everyone,
I'm excited to announce that my book, An Introduction to the USA Computing Olympiad, is released! It's a one-stop-shop comprehensive training resource for the Bronze and Silver divisions of the USACO. This book was written to fulfill the need of a standard textbook aimed for the USACO, analogous to AoPS Volume 1 for math, which I think the USACO community has been lacking for a while. The book is available for free in pdf form at the links below:
Beginners may also benefit from this brief article
Auto comment: topic has been updated by darren_yao (previous revision, new revision, compare).
UPD: fixed formatting.
I can confirm that this is a wonderful book in terms of exposition and hope more people get to see it :)
Good work!
Great work!
Let us all upvote this blog so more of us beginners can benefit from this good work by darren_yao
Wow, this looks like a tremendous amount of work. I'm really curious about a few things.
How long did it take you? How old are you and are you a teacher? Have you written it in your free time, without the money compensation from e.g. university?
This took about two and a half months from start to finish. I worked probably like 2-4 hours a day, although not always productively because I tend to get distracted (by Discord especially). I'm a high school senior and I did this on my own time; I don't teach any classes as of now, but I plan to do so in the future.
https://codeforces.me/blog/entry/50728?#comment-346603
:D :D :D
XD XD ... you got him
Can you make the source code of the book available on github?
Sorry, I will not be releasing LaTeX source code.
Glanced through it briefly, it looks great! I like how you start out from the very beginning, i/o stuff, and work your way up, never expecting the reader to know a bunch starting off. I remember when I started cp, I was stuck on the first problem I did for >1h just because I couldn't get i/o with files lol. Should make it much more accessible for someone who wants to get introduced to many crucial topics while being realistic in the reader's knowledge and making sure it explains all fundamental syntax. Will definitely recommend to beginners.
Thanks! Input/Output is a bottleneck that makes a lot of beginners quit, and I in particular constantly bugged my friends to fix my input reader code, so I tried to make sure beginners wouldn't have this problem anymore.
The best part i liked in the book is every concept ending with Olympiad and codeforces problems. Great work
Very nice. Thanks for writing this!
Thank you for the contribution to the CP community!
So awesome to see resources tailor made for Java!
Honestly I think many people have been waiting for something like this. Well done!
Gee I should've seen this 1 year earlier :/ This is a huge effort, congrats, and thanks!
I've created 5 mashups with problems from chapter 15:
Set 1, Set 2, Set 3, Set 4, Set 5
Wow! This is amazing! This is the first book I've ever seen that only uses Java as its source code. Will you write another version for Gold? If so, that'd be great.
Maybe in the future, if I or another author has time ;P
Nice reference! Quick erratum for section 6.2: in C++ next_permutation actually generates permutations in lexicographically increasing order (and presumably not via Heap's algorithm). See http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/algorithm/next_permutation/.
fixed and updated. thanks
It's such a great book and plays a much-needed role in an introduction for USACO competitors. Great work, and thank you for releasing this!
Thanks for the help! Also, Mikey CM orz
Thank you so much for your contribution! I will find time to read it carefully and I believe that it must be an amazing book.