Like any sport, you should have a good coach - informatics is no different. I used to participate in such competitions in high school and I can tell you that r

Like any sport, you should have a good coach - informatics is no different. I used to participate in such competitions in high school and I can tell you that reading books is not enough. There has to be someone to teach you the basics so you can build on that. I started very early with Logo, moved to Pascal and finally graduated to C++. In the end, most of the problems can be solved with a standard algorithm - e.g. graph theory (DFS, flow, etc), dynamic programming (Knapsack), geometry (finding intersections or area of polygons). Some problems require heuristic solutions, but that is very rare. You need a lot of experience and that is gained by solving problems. You can find a lot of online judges that have problem sets from very easy to difficult - e.g. http://acm.zju.edu.cn/onlinejudge/showProblemsets.do http://acm.zju.edu.cn/onlinejudge/showProblemsets.do or http://uva.onlinejudge.org/index.php?option=com_onlinejudge&Itemid=8 http://uva.onlinejudge.org/index.php?option=com_onlinejudge&...