New Blog: http://10000hourcountdown.blogspot.co.uk/

As promised my progress blog.

http://10000hourcountdown.blogspot.co.uk/

For those that do not know, read my first article on the 10,000 hour theory then my second one on getting started again. I essentially have this 'outline plan' to become a master of computing by spending 10,000 hours of my free time studying Computer Science. To make the 10,000 hours measurable, in a way that can be contributed to human knowledge as a whole I set up the 'sister-blog' linked to above that is essentially a work diary, detailing what I studied for how long and a brief overview of what I learnt in that time period.

To Catch A Shooting Star

As I am starting to get back into computing after my break with it to learn about and solidfy personal discipline I came across an article that clarified something that used to puzzle me so much when 'playing around' with coding.

 I always struggled with the fact that once a process produced its outcome, say 5+5, the answer would be produced and the program would either close or go onto its next process seemingly destroying the outcome of the previous process. Well it turns out this is to do with the fact that computers only do what they are told and if you told them to add '5+5', that's exactly what they are going to do. You didn't ask them to save that outcome so they obviously are not going to do that for you. What you have to do however is 'Catch a Shooting Star'. The shooting Star in this instance being the outcome from the process that is going to blink up on your screen then just disappear. To save this shooting star you have to hold on to it, hold on to it by storing it as a Variable. 

 Hopefully this produced one of those 'ohhhhhh yeah, of course' moments to you as it did me'. Knowing that if I want anything to continue existing in computing it has to be stored makes a huge difference to the way I view programming and I am feeling far more confident about not being confused about why my 'programs' would just blink up and then disappear. One thing that still puzzles me however is where does that '25' (from the '5+5' example) go, is it just erased?, was it ever stored?. 

 Anyway I hope this provides a little bit more clarity to understanding programming as it did for me.

Introduction to Computer Memory

 Got an interesting link set to me from a friend concerning Computer Memory, apparently this text is THE text for understanding computer memory physically and theoretically. Obviously with memory being one of the most integral parts to programming I feel this has to be jumped to the top of my reading list.

ftp://ftp.linux.org.ua/pub/docs/developer/general/cpumemory.pdf

 As I am currently following the lecture series at the moment I will start updating what I am picking up from this text, from the first few pages I read already, just 'flicking through' I know it is definitely worth my while and will give me a great advantage in the future when I begin to practice assembly language and any other low-levels tinkering I may have planned.

:)