Hello! I am a fairly advanced programmer (although I'm pretty new), and I know the basic algorithms and data structures used for most problems. However, I don't know how to get better from this state onwards.

I should say that my strength is mainly DS problems. Greedy, D&C, DP I do pretty well (once I recognize a specific-type problem), constructive algorithms seem very hard to me (for example link). For DS, I know pretty much all there is to know about segment trees, BIT, sqrt-decomposition (I call it a DS, don't blame me :D), BSTs, hash, etc (the basic ones), although problems that involve advanced tricks with these (e.g. persistent segment trees, lazy propagation) seem very appealing.

I want to prepare mysef for this year's ACM-ICPC contest, as it is my first year in Uni. I have been learning algo intensively since December.

I would be grateful if you know any good lists of problems that are really crucial and/or teach useful new techniques, as I am stuck momentarily. I have read the results on Google for ACM algorithms and such, so a personal response would be a lot more appreciated :).

I will also try to keep a list updated with interesting problems and techniques, in case other people struggle with the same issue. Maybe this tread will become a learning portal for more people :D.

LIST:

• (http://e-maxx.ru/algo/) -> there are a lot of algorithmic problems greatly explained, as well as tricks and great algorithms -- the website is in Russian, although it can be translated using Google Translate -- great resource

Thank you a lot!