Motarack's blog

A suggestion for Codeforces to write a book
By Motarack, history, 4 years ago, In English

Most people here are aware of the book "Looking for a Challenge", a collection of the best problems from contests organized or co-organized by the University of Warasw. I think it would be a nice idea for Codeforces to write a similar book including its best problems with high quality tutorials, Codeforces can make money by selling it and users will be happy with the problems.

I think the main benefit of such a book would be highlighting good old and not very popular problems, and offering an educational tutorial that can help users deeply understand them.

The same suggestion goes for other platforms with a big archive of problems like Topcoder and Opencup, and maybe non English platforms that have a collection of good problems.

I would be interested in hearing your opinions.

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4 years ago, # |
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I would say that licensing under a CC license (BY-SA for example), then publish both free PDFs and charged paperback books would be nice, because this will get community involved. also translating can take place.

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4 years ago, # |
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Title: AntonTrygubForces

Alternatively, ad-hocForces

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4 years ago, # |
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It's easier to first introduce voting on problem quality or just making a separate website where a few people would choose interesting problems. Or maybe we already have that in form of ladders and training sheets? What you're suggesting is then to print the chosen set of problems, that should be the last optional step.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    I think Noam527 's idea (in his latest post) could perhaps help

    https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/81293

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    You somewhere missed the step "write high-quality editorials". 99% of the current editorials are not ok for an educational book. Just like a lot of solutions there, but the code seems the smaller of the problems

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      Good point. But then it's better to first invest resources into improving editorials or preparing them well in the first place, right? Once we have many good problems with high-quality editorials, we can put them in a book.

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