This book is designed to serve as a textbook for an algorithm course focusing on programming as well as a programming course focusing on algorithms. The book is specially designed to train students to participate in competitions, especially the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

The book covers several important topics related to the development of programming skills such as, fundamental concepts of contest, game plan for a contest, essential data structures for contest, input/output techniques, brute force method, mathematics, sorting, searching, greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, graphs, computational geometry, Valladolid Online Judge problem category, selected ACM programming problems, common codes/routines for programming, Standard Template Library (STL), PC2 contest administration and team guide. The book also lists some important websites/books for ACM/ICPC Programmers.