Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

Seemed interesting up until the "Shortening code" section, that'd drive me mad.

This is a good resource that I'm currently going through to prepare for interviews. Another one would be Competitive Programming (3rd edition) [1] but for general interview skills the Codility lessons are also OK [2].

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Programming-3rd-Steven-Ha...

2 - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WjXxbdle0_Syip_LygBpnZkfHv...

Yup. Check out TopCoder[1]. They have regular programming contests every week or so. The contests are conducted in two divisions(amateur - div 2) and (pro - div 1) and candidates are assigned different colors on the basis of their performance. Becoming a red coder in TopCoder is a pretty big thing in the competitive programming community. For example, Adam D Angelo who is the co-founder of Quora used to be Red on Topcoder[2]. Most of the red coders of TopCoder get hired by companies like Google, Facebook etc. It's pretty hard for one to fuck up a competitive programming interview once you became a Red level candidate in TopCoder. Mark Zuckerberg also tried TopCoder for a few months while in Harvard [3]. CodeForces[4] also has a pretty big online community. I think it has become more popular than TopCoder these days. They also have regular contests every few days. Facebook[5] and Google[6] also hosts competitive programming contests every year. If you managed to make it to the final round I think they would invite you for an interview.

1 https://www.topcoder.com/

2 https://www.topcoder.com/members/dangelo/

3 https://www.topcoder.com/members/mzuckerberg

4 http://codeforces.com

5 https://www.facebook.com/hackercup/

6 https://code.google.com/codejam/

Code should be written for readability, not typing speed.

This is not production quality code that is running on some important business. It's competitive programming.

Speed is the goal here.