Competitive Programming
What you'll learn
- Competitive Programming
- Algorithms
- Data Structures
- Programming
- Merge Sort, QuickSort, Count Sort, Bucket Sort
- Linear Search, Binary Search, QuickSelect, Two Pointer Technique
- Stacks, Queues, Hash Tables, Hash Sets, Heap-Based Structures, Binary Search Tree-Based Data Structures, Coordinate Compression, Custom Comparators
- Hash Functions, Collisions, Rabin-Karp, Sliding Window Technique
- Greedy Algorithms
- Iterative Complete Search, Backtracking, Permutations, Subsets, Pruning
- Divide and Conquer, Binary Search the Answer, the Bisection Method
- Dynamic Programming: Competitive Approach, Top-Down and Bottom-Up DP, Space Optimisation, Prefix Sums, Backtracking to Find Solutions
- Graph Representation: Adjacency Lists, Adjacency Matrices, Edge Lists, Weighted and Unweighted Graphs
- Graph Exploration: Breadth-First Search (BFS), Depth-First Search (DFS), Connected Components, Multi-Source BFS
- Directed Graphs and Cycles: Topological Sort, Strongly Connected Components, BFS for Single-Source Shortest Paths
- Shortest Paths: Dijkstra, Floyd-Warshall's, Bellman-Ford and Negative-Weight Cycles, Arbitrages and the Logarithm Trick
- Trees: Special Properties, Faster Shortest Paths, Diameter, Minimum Spanning Trees
- Union-Find Disjoint Sets: Optimised Implementation, Kruskal's Algorithm, Minimum Spanning Tree Variants
- Strings: Dynamic Programming on Strings, Longest Common Subsequence, Edit Distance, Longest Palindromic Substring, Tries, Suffix Tries
- Game Theory: States and Transitions, Minimax for Optimal Game Playing, Dynamic Programming To Recover Optimal Strategies
- Approaching Interactive Problems
Requirements
- Basic C++, such as conditionals, loops, variables or functions. No Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) required.
Description
Ready to take your programming skills to the next level? In this course, which will help both novice and advanced programmers alike, you will dominate the algorithms and data structures necessary to do well in contests and to gain a competitive edge over other candidates in software interviews.
There are many tricks which are gained through experience and competitive programmers have a sixth sense when it comes to breaking problems down into the building blocks that make up a solution and which many are reluctant to share. Here I will let you in on the techniques and the applications that are useful for the field, focusing on real problems and how they are solved, while giving you an intuition on what is going on under the hood and why these ideas work.
From dynamic programming to graph algorithms and backtracking, you will get to practise and feel confident about many topics, learning advanced concepts such as union-find disjoint sets, tries and game theory without feeling lost, and to apply new content as soon as you learn it, with over 100 suggested problems, both from past olympiads and online judges and some created by me specifically for this course. All of them come with detailed solutions. With this course, you will be ready to participate in online contests and informatics olympiads, and will have the experience necessary to continue advancing in this field. Are you ready to take this big step in your journey?
Who this course is for:
- Students and engineers wishing to delve into competitive programming, diving into the details and soaring up the rankings
- Developers with a desire to master algorithms to succeed in technical interviews
- High school students with a passion for Mathematics interested in seeing algorithms applied to technology
- Anyone interested in gaining insights and learning the details of algorithms and data structures
Instructor
![Blanca Huergo](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 3.9 Instructor Rating
- 77 Reviews
- 7,322 Students
- 1 Course
I am the Chairwoman of the Spanish Informatics Olympiad for Girls (OIFem), as well as the coach and team leader that trains the Spanish EGOI team. In only two years' time, 3 bronze and 2 silver medals have been achieved, thus leading Spain to be one of the most successful nations in the European competition. I am also one of the instructors the 2021/22 edition of C1b3rwall Academy, an online cybersecurity initiative from the Spanish Police Force with tens of thousands of students worldwide.
I have taught myself how to program, specialising in a competitive setting, which has reaped me huge success, such as a gold medal in the Spanish Informatics Olympiad, putting me in the 4-person team that represented Spain in international competitions, such as CIIC, where I earned an international silver medal, and IOI. I now study Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Oxford.
Having completed over 50 MOOCs from world-renowned universities and companies, I have seen a gap between the material in books and online courses and what is demanded in top-notch competitions. I come to Udemy to share my experience with students hoping to enter this exciting world and to give them the push and knowledge they need to soar through the rankings.