darren_yao's blog

An Introduction to the USA Computing Olympiad -- Book Released
By darren_yao, history, 4 years ago, In English

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

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4 years ago, # |
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Auto comment: topic has been updated by darren_yao (previous revision, new revision, compare).

UPD: fixed formatting.

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4 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +16 Vote: I do not like it

I can confirm that this is a wonderful book in terms of exposition and hope more people get to see it :)

Good work!

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4 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +21 Vote: I do not like it

Great work!

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4 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +5 Vote: I do not like it

Let us all upvote this blog so more of us beginners can benefit from this good work by darren_yao

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4 years ago, # |
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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?

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4 years ago, # |
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Can you make the source code of the book available on github?

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4 years ago, # |
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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.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    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.

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4 years ago, # |
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The best part i liked in the book is every concept ending with Olympiad and codeforces problems. Great work

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4 years ago, # |
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Very nice. Thanks for writing this!

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4 years ago, # |
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Thank you for the contribution to the CP community!

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4 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +13 Vote: I do not like it

So awesome to see resources tailor made for Java!

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4 years ago, # |
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Honestly I think many people have been waiting for something like this. Well done!

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4 years ago, # |
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Gee I should've seen this 1 year earlier :/ This is a huge effort, congrats, and thanks!

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4 years ago, # |
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I've created 5 mashups with problems from chapter 15:
Set 1, Set 2, Set 3, Set 4, Set 5

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4 years ago, # |
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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.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    Maybe in the future, if I or another author has time ;P

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4 years ago, # |
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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/.

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4 years ago, # |
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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!

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4 years ago, # |
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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.

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