Basic Things in Programming Contest

In the past there were more simpler problems in programming contest than present. Day by day the problems are becoming hard. So if you are in the past you will not be able to solve the present problems. If you want to participate in programming contest, you should have the following capability:

1. Understand the problem (What is input and what is output)
2. Understand the catagory of problem
3. Knowledge of mathamatics
4. Knowledge about graph theory
5. Collection of different kinds of searching and sorting algorithm
6. Different kind of technic of reading from file
7. Different kind of tecnic of writing to a file
8. Knowledge about time limit in programming
9. Clear concept of program coding in Borland C/C++ or Visual C/C++,Java