I an starting from the scratch for competitive programming. Could anyone help or guide me?

Question

I am gonna start with c++ from the scratch. What are the things i have to learn to start competitive programming from c++? I need someone to guide me through this journey. Please anybody there to guide me?

Answer 1

If you haven't learned c++ yet, you'll definitely need to start with that. Sololearn's c++ course can help get a very basic knowledge and then tutorials like http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/introduction/codeblocks/ can build on that. You'll need to get c++ code compiled and running but you can pick from many IDE's and command line tools like gcc, Visual c++, CodeBlocks. You'll also need to learn c++ data types and algorithms such as arrays, vector, list, iterators, map, write your own functions, recursion.

I'm not sure what you mean by competitive programming but I'll try to answer a few clearer versions of the question.

Question: "I am starting from scratch and want to use c++ for programming competitions such as ones sponsored by ACM( https://www.acm.org/icpc-winners ). How can I get started?"

Answer:
After learning the basics of c++ mentioned earlier, practice by solving lots of previous competition questions and problems similar to the ones that appear in programming competitions.
projecteuler.net, hackerrank.com provide lots of good practice questions and provide tools in the site to run them. Searching online for things like "acm competition practice" gets a lot of good results too. https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~acm-web/practice/ is one I just came across.

The ACM programming competition I competed in set us up in small teams of 3 or 4 people that shared the same computer and scoring was based on a mixture of speed at solving problems, number of problems solved, and we were penalized a bit for submitting without passing all hidden test cases. My team performed well enough to go from a local single university competition to a regional level but didn't go beyond that.

Question: "I am starting from scratch and want to get into the competitive world of c++ programming. How can I get started?"

Answer: After learning basics of c++ mentioned earlier, practice creating software with it. Challenge yourself to make increasingly useful software or contribute to github projects that use c++.

Answer 2

Josh Greig
I am glad. It means a lot. Very helpful.