Purpose

It has always been my intention to study computers and computing to a high level of understanding. As I have neither the money nor the inclination to do so at a university I have spent the last 6 years programming professionally and pursuing my own projects. Upon recent reflection I have reached the conclusion that my current proficiency and general understanding of the field was less I had hoped for.

It is my intent to outline for myself a course through which I can begin study.

I expect this outline to grow and change as I dig deeper into the many aspects of computing; but hey, you have to start somewhere.

Outline

What Is Computing?
History of Computing
Computing Theory
1. Information Theory
2. Computation
Information Theory
Circuits
1. Electricity
2. Boolean Algebra
Mathematics
1. ???
2. Discrete Math
  1. Set Theory
3. Sequences
  1. Fibonacci Numbers
4. Probability
  1. Deterministic system
  2. Statistical independence
  3. Markov Chains
5. Logarithm
Hardware
1. CPU
  1. Design
    1. Data
      1. Two's Complement
  2. What is a CPU?
  3. How does a CPU work?
  4. Parts of a CPU
  5. Architectures
    1. CISC
      1. x86
        
        Itanium
    2. RISC
  6. Unknown???
    - EPIC
    - Instruction Set
2. RAM
3. Hard drives
  1. IDE vs SCSI
Networking
Algorithms & Data Structures
1. Arbitrarily long numbers
Programming
1. Data Representation
  1. Numbers
    1. Two's Complement
    2. Floating Point
  2. Character Data
    1. ASCII
    2. Unicode
2. Languages
  1. Machine Language
  2. Assembler
    1. AT&T
    2. Intel
  3. C
3. Firmware
4. Software
  1. Operating Systems
    1. VAX/VMS
    2. UNIX
      1. BSD
      2. Linux
    3. DOS
    4. Windows
      1. 1.0
      2. 2.0
      3. 3.x
      4. 95
      5. NT
???
- Bayesian Networks

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