D is for Digital: What a Well-Informed Person Should Know about Computers and Communications

318 Pages·2012·3.13 MB·English

by  Brian Kernighan

D is for Digital
What a well-informed person should know
about computers and communications
Brian W. Kernighan
Paper edition:
ISBN-13: 978-1463733896,
ISBN-10: 1463733895
Copyright © 2012 by Brian W. Kernighan
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, optical or mechanical, including photocopying or recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written
permission from the copyright owner.
1202051148
Also by Brian Kernighan
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Software Tools (with P. J. Plauger)
Software Tools in Pascal (with P. J. Plauger)
The C Programming Language (with D. M. Ritchie)
The AWK Programming Language (with A. V. Aho and P. J. Weinberger)
The Unix Programming Environment (with R. Pike)
AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming (with R. Fourer
and D. M. Gay)
The Practice of Programming (with R. Pike)
Hello, World! Opinion Columns from The Daily Princetonian
For Meg
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part I: Hardware
Chapter 1: What's in a Computer?
1.1 Logical Construction
1.1.1 CPU
1.1.2 RAM
1.1.3 Disks and secondary storage
1.1.4 Et cetera
1.2 Physical Construction
1.3 Moore's Law
Chapter 2: Bits, Bytes, and Representation of Information
2.1 Analog versus Digital
2.2 Analog-Digital Conversion
2.3 Bits, Bytes, and Binary
2.3.1 Bits
2.3.2 Powers of two and powers of ten
2.3.3 Binary numbers
2.3.4 Bytes
2.4 Summary
Chapter 3: Inside the CPU
3.1 The Toy Computer
3.2 Real CPUs
3.3 Caching
3.4 Other Kinds of Computers
Wrapup on Hardware
Part II: Software
Chapter 4: Algorithms
4.1 Linear Algorithms
4.2 Binary Search
4.3 Sorting
4.4 Hard Problems and Complexity
4.5 Summary
Chapter 5: Programming and Programming Languages
5.1 Assembly Language
5.2 High-Level Languages
5.3 Software Development
5.3.1 Libraries, interfaces, and development kits
5.3.2 Bugs
5.4 Software as Property
5.4.1 Intellectual property
5.4.2 Standards
5.4.3 Open source
Chapter 6: Software Systems
6.1 Operating Systems
6.2 How an Operating System Works
6.2.1 System calls
6.2.2 Device drivers
6.3 Other Operating Systems
6.4 File Systems
6.4.1 Disk file systems
6.4.2 Removing files
6.4.3 Other file systems
6.5 Applications
6.6 Layers of Software
Chapter 7: Learning to Program
7.1 Programming Language Concepts
7.2 A First JavaScript Example
7.3 A Second JavaScript Example
7.4 Loops
7.5 Conditionals
7.6 Libraries and Interfaces
7.7 How JavaScript Works
Wrapup on Software
Part III: Communications
Chapter 8: Networking
8.1 Telephones and Modems
8.2 Cable and DSL
8.3 Local Area Networks and Ethernet
8.4 Wireless
8.5 Cell Phones
8.6 Summary
Chapter 9: The Internet
9.1 An Internet Overview
9.2 Domain Names and Addresses
9.2.1 Domain Name System
9.2.2 IP addresses
9.2.3 Root servers
9.2.4 Registering your own domain
9.3 Routing
9.4 Protocols
9.4.1 IP, the Internet Protocol
9.4.2 TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol
9.5 Higher-level Protocols
9.5.1 FTP: File Transfer Protocol
9.5.2 Telnet: remote login
9.5.3 SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
9.5.4 File sharing and peer-to-peer protocols
9.5.5 An aside on copyright
9.5.6 Summary of high-level protocols
9.6 Bandwidth
9.7 Compression
9.8 Error Detection and Correction
9.9 Summary
Chapter 10: The World Wide Web
10.1 How the Web Works
10.2 HTML
10.3 Forms
10.4 Cookies
10.5 Active Content in Web Pages
10.6 Active Content Elsewhere
10.7 Viruses and Worms
10.8 Web Security
10.8.1 Attacks on clients
10.8.2 Attacks on servers
10.8.3 Attacks on information in transit
10.8.4 Defending yourself
10.9 Cryptography
10.9.1 Secret-key cryptography
10.9.2 Public-key cryptography
10.10 Summary