Question

Does reading the book Competitive Programming 3 really help with competitive programming?

Answer 1

Sure, just like reading CLRS helps with competitive programming, as long as you do it the right way.

CP3 is a specialized algorithms textbook, so you should read it like one:

• If a paragraph is just English text, you can skim it or read it quickly.
• When you get to a math or algorithm section, slow down and make sure you understand what the authors are saying. If anything is unclear, look it up in the index, or Google it.
• CP3 has exercises throughout each section. These are good for checking your understanding, but you don’t necessarily have to do them all.
• Spend most of your time solving and submitting the UVa Online Judge problems at the end of each section. You definitely don’t want to solve all of them, since that would mean solving a lot of easy problems that you wouldn’t get much benefit from. One idea is to solve all the starred problems, which are the ones the authors think are most important. There are only 462 of those, which is a reasonable number to complete as you’re reading the book, maybe over the course of a year.

The advantage of CP3 over a standard algorithms textbook is that it’s written specifically for programming contest preparation. So the algorithms and other techniques they discuss are the ones used in contests, and the programming exercises are actual contest problems. With a standard textbook, you’ll always be doing some translation from the academic to the contest mindset, and you’ll encounter material that’s unlikely to show up in a contest.

Yes, the book is oriented towards IOI and ICPC. So it won’t match up quite as well if you’re preparing for GCJ or Hacker Cup or Codeforces. But if you read the book and solve the 462 starred problems, you’ll get a good introduction to competitive programming in general.