Published from the GyanKosh Publications, Ahmed Shamsul Arefin's book takes an ideal apprentice into the world of programming contests while very few international books are available in the market with such of a training manual.

"For the last few years, while maintaining my programming contest training website (http://www.acmsolver.org) by meeting demands from the lot who took part in the Association for Computer Machinery's (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), I felt the urge that there should be some guidelines for the beginners to enter the world of programming. Hence I started collecting tutorials and put them on my site, in addition to my self-designed problems, categorised them and allowed online entry to these materials free of charge," said Arefin.

The book has had its initial publication in pdf format in the Valladolid Online Judge (VOJ) (http://www.acm.uva.es/p) under the University of Valladolid, Spain (UVS), a site that serves as one of the world's most popular trainer sites for any programming contestant, providing more than 1,700 problems as per the mode the ACMICPC contests would set.

"As I reviewed the book's contents to write a foreword note for it, I found this manuscript as a complement to our site for the VOJ as the writer has added a classified section honouring the problem-sets from our site by categorising the problems under sections for the beginners, saving their time," stated Prof Miguel A Revilla, ACMICPC international steering committee member and problem activist, UVS.

"This book is designed to serve as a textbook for an algorithm course focusing on programming as well as a programming course focusing on algorithms that will help train students to participate in competitions like the ACMICPC," said Dr M Lutfar Rahman, professor, department of computer science and engineering, University of Dhaka.

"While I studied at Chittagong University of Engineering Technology as a computer engineering student, I felt how amazingly useful it would have been if there were a book for the beginners. I was always curious to find a way out of this, for me and for the upcoming new talents," said Arefin, who has a local copyright on the book. He said his book should meet an even distribution throughout the country to help any prospective programmer make that head start needed.

The book covers important topics related to the development of programming skills such as fundamental concepts of the contest, game plan, essential data structures, input/output techniques, brute force method, mathematical logics, sorting, searching, greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, graphs, computational geometry, VOJ problem category, selected ACM programming problems, common codes and routines for programming, Standard Template Library (STL), PC2 contest administration and team-guide. It also lists some important sites and books for an ACMICPC contestant.

Arefin, a student of Master of Science in Information and Communication Technology from Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology and also a lecturer at Daffodil International University (DIT), participated in the 2001 ACM regional contest in Dhaka. His team ranked 10th in the contest.

He became one of the contest organisers at VOJ by arranging "Rockford Programming Contest 2001" and several other local contests at other academia such as Cuet and DIT. His site on programming training has been linked with ACM UVS, Ural State University (Russia), and Polish Online Judge Sphere.

Besides, he has been working on open source software development, web development, and 3D game development based on DirectX Technology.