Search for notes by fellow students, in your own course and all over the country.
Browse our notes for titles which look like what you need, you can preview any of the notes via a sample of the contents. After you're happy these are the notes you're after simply pop them into your shopping cart.
Document Preview
Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above
A Short Introduction to Programming
At its most basic level, programming a computer simply means telling it what to do, and
this vapid-sounding definition is not even a joke
...
Sometimes these mechanisms are chosen because they have been found to be convenient
for programmers (people) to use; other times they have been chosen because they're easy
for the computer to understand
...
Programming is not a deeply theoretical subject like Chemistry or Physics; you don't
need an advanced degree to do well at it
...
You don't have to be strong
or coordinated or graceful or have perfect pitch
...
If you've ever taken a shop class,
you may remember that some students seemed to be able to turn out beautiful projects
effortlessly, while other students were all thumbs and made the exact mistakes that the
teacher told them not to make
...
Attention to detail In programming, the details matter
...
You can't be vague; you can't describe your program
3/4 of the way and then say ``You know what I mean?'' and have the compiler figure out
the rest
...
If the language says you have to
declare variables before using them, you have to
...
2
...
They do exactly what you tell them to do:
no more, no less
3
...
The more of these details you can keep in your head at one
time (as opposed to looking them up all the time), the more successful you'll be at
programming
...
Ability to abstract, think on several levels This is probably the most important skill
in programming
...
One
of the most powerful techniques for managing the complexity of a software system (or
any complex system) is to compartmentalize it into little ``black box'' processes which
perform useful tasks but which hide some details so you don't have to think about them
all the time
...
C is a practical and still-current
software tool; it remains one of the most popular programming languages in existence,
particularly in areas such as embedded systems
...
Also, there is an enormous code-base of C programs developed
over the last 30 years, and many systems that will need to be maintained and extended for
many years to come
...
At onelevel this is C-specific: to learn to design, code and debug complete C programs
...
This involves learning to decompose large problems into manageable
systems of modules; to use modularity and clean interfaces to design for correctness,
clarity and flexibility
...
Native binary code is called machine language
...
Later, with the advent of
terminals with keyboards and monitors, such programs were written as sequences of
hexadecimal numbers, where each hexadecimal digit represents a four binary digit
sequence
...
In order to express operations more abstractly, assembly languages were developed
...
For example, the MOV instruction moves data into a
register, the ADD instruction adds the contents of two registers together
...
While assembly languages are a considerable improvement on raw binary, they still very
low-level and unsuited to large-scale programming
...
The 1950s and 60s saw the introduction of high-level languages, such as Fortran and
Algol
...
Also,
these mechanisms are an abstraction of the underlying machine instructions and, unlike
assembler, are not tied to any particular hardware
...
To produce executable code from such a program, it is
translated to machinespecific assembler language by a compiler program, which is then
coverted to machine code by an assembler (see Appendix B for details on the compilation
process)
...
An alternative is to
translate the program on-the-fly using an interpreter program (e
...
, Matlab, Python, etc)
...
While usually
slower than a compiled program, interpreted code avoids the overhead of compilationtime and so is good for rapid implementation and testing
...
g
...
A high-level program is compiled to a special byte-code
rather than machine language, and this intermediate code is then interpreted by the virtual
machine program
...
Each of these representations has is relative advantages: compiled
code is typically fastest, interpreted code is highly portable and quick to implement and
test, and a virtual machine offers a combination of speed and portability
...
The algorithmic structure of a program is more apparent, as is the
flow of information between different program components
...
It is important to realise that programming in a highlevel language is about communicating a software design to programmers not to the
computer
...
Making the program run fast is (mostly) the compiler’s concern
...
Ritchie to develop the UNIX operating system at AT
& T Bell Laboratories of USA
...
In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie produced the first publicly available
description of C, now known as the K&R standard
...
The C has now become a widely used professional
language for various reasons
...
C is a successor of B language, which was introduced around 1970
...
(ANSI)
...
Today, C is the most widely used and popular System Programming Language
...
Today's most popular Linux OS and RBDMS MySQL have been written in C
...
2
...
4
...
6
...
8
...
It is highly Portable i
...
, programs written in one computer can be run on another
It is well suited for structure program, thus allows the user to think about the
problem in the terms of functional blocks
...
It produces efficient programs
...
Popularity of C
1
...
It was friendly capable and reliable
3
...
4
...
Next as it could not come up to make ALGOL 60 better one they moved to
“BCPL” (Basic Combines Programming Language
...
At the same time a language called “B” written by ken Thompson at AT&T Bell
laboratories as a further simplification of BCPL
...
“C” s compactness and coherence is mainly due to its one man language
...
C was adopted as a system development language because it
produces code that runs nearly as fast as code written in assembly language