[skorned]

There's a lot of coding competitions that occur regularly, which ones do you participate in? I want to get a list going, so those new to them can have a good selection to pick from. Also, is there anything special that sets a competition apart from the rest? Lastly, if you know of any good tutorials or references that newbies can use to get started with coding competitions, please do add them too.

I'll get started, the famous coding competitions I'm aware of are:

• Google Code Jam (every year)
  
• TopCoder (every week)
  
• CodeChef (every month?)

[blackcompe]

I don't compete in any of them. I do CodeChef problems every so often though. They're pretty hard. Basically, to succeed you need a thorough (very thorough) knowledge of algorithms: graph algorithms, dynamic programming, network flow, number theory, etc. Once you got that down, it's all about knowning what algorithms to use and applying slight variations to the algorithms to solve the problem.

See books to help with programming competitions.