I am still following both courses I talked about on previous post.
Today I learned:
- Binary numbers and how to switch from decimal to binary and reverse (This I already had some previous knowledge). I also learned they are represented always with 4 digits, so if you wanna write 3 in binnary, instead of writing “11”, you write “0011”. Two groups of these form a “byte”. And this means that if you have 1MB storage (1.000.000 bytes), this means you can store 8.000.000 “0”‘s and “1”s in that file!
- Hexadecimal numbers – This I didn’t know about. It is a very interesting concept in which each set of 4 digit binary numbers can be respresented with just 1 character. (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F). This is super interesting and makes sense. At the end of the day is like “Compressing” the binary system even more, so every number placer is now a power of 16, instead of a power of 2. This allows to reproduce big binary numbers in much shorter notation, and to switch from one notation to another with ease. – Have you seen “The Martian”? Hahah – Now I understand the code they use to communicate. Basically the signs around the bot are the 16 hexadecimal possibilities, and then he uses a table where each hexadecimal number is translated into a “Character” of our alphabet, allowing earth to communicate with Matt Damon – You see, one day of work and already feeling smarter. 😀
- In computers everything is 0/1. I learned that there are 8 bits in 1 byte, and now things start to make sense.
- “In any program there must be a specification of what kind of data you are working with… is it numbers, are they strings?”
- RAM is memory that only exists when computer is on – Programs use it! – Interesting… and also programming languages help us keep track of where are things in RAM whenever something needs to be recalled so that we don’t have to memorize that.
- On MIT course very interesting… Code is like a RECIPE. You need some tool in which you can input a RECIPE and then it does what the recipe says. This is an Interpreter. Also, the recipe needs to be writen in a particular language, which is the programing languages! – Explained difference syntax – semantics.
- On MIT course it also stressed out importance of developing a coding style.
Those are just my anotations. And for the moment I will proceed just annotating things I find helpful!
