TSA Coding General Study Guide

Computer Hardware

• What is hardware?

• What is a motherboard?

• What is the central processing unit (CPU)?

• What are the two major CPU manufacturers for PCs (personal computers)?

• What is mass storage?

• What is a Hard Disk Drive (HDD)?

• What is a Solid State Drive (SSD)?

• Which is generally faster: HDD or SSD?

• Which is less prone to failure: HDD or SSD? Why?

• What is random access memory (RAM)?

• When is RAM used?

• How is RAM different from mass storage? Why?

• When should mass storage be used over RAM?

• What is cache (in the context of computing)?

• What is a graphical processing unit (GPU)?

• What two places does the GPU typically reside?

• What is a clock (in the context of computing)? Hint: it doesn’t tell you what day it is, and it’s very important for a CPU to run.

• What is the power supply unit (PSU)?

• What is Universal Serial Bus (USB)? When would you use it?

• What is a Secure Digital (SD) card? When would you use it?

• What is Video Graphics Array (VGA), Digital Visual Interface (DVI), and High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) for?

• What are routers?

• What are modems?

Encodings

• What is an encoding?

• What is binary?

• What is decimal?

• What is octal?

• What is hexadecimal?

• What is base-64?

• What is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)?

• What is Unicode Transformation Format 8 (UTF-8)?

• What is the difference between encodings and encryption?

Units of Measure

• What is a bit?

• What is a byte?

• What is a hertz?

• What are metric prefixes (kilo, mega, giga, terra, peta)?

• What are binary prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi)?

• What is the difference between metric and binary prefixes?

• Why don’t we really use binary prefixes?

• You buy a thumb drive with 64 gigabytes. However, when you check the properties, the numbers are off. Why is this?

Firmware

• What is firmware?

• What is system setup?

• What is BIOS/UEFI?

How Programming Languages work

• What is a compiler?

• What is an assembler?

• What is an interpreter (in computing)?

• What is assembly?

• What is a runtime environment?

• What is bytecode?

• What is machine code?

• What does it mean for a project to be open source? What are some examples of open source projects?

• What is a proprietary program?

• What is a high-level language? Examples?

• What is a low-level language? Examples?

• How are high-level and low-level programming languages different?

• What does it mean for a programming language to be object-oriented? Examples?

Programming Languages

• What is a programming language?

• Identify the following languages and list common uses:

  • Java

  • C

  • C#

  • C++

  • Python

  • JavaScript

Variable Types

• What is an integer (int)?

• What is a string (str)?

• What is a character (chr)?

• What is a floating-point (float) number?

• What is a boolean (bool) value?

• Why are there different variable types?

• What is type casting?

• What is a list?

• What is an array?

• What is a set?

• What is a dictionary (map)?

Specific Coding Terms

• What are if statements?

• What are other statements?

• What are logic gates?

• What do each of these logic gates do?

  • OR

  • AND

  • NOT

  • XOR

• What is a for loop?

• What is a while loop?

• What is a function?

• What is an object?

• What is a method?

• What is a class?

General Coding Terms

• What is a bug?

• What is debugging?

• What is code?

• What is an algorithm?

• What is a program?

• What is data?

• What is input and output?

Internet

• What is the internet?

• What is a packet?

• What is Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)?

• What is User Diagram Protocol / Internet Protocol (UDP/IP)?

• How is TCP and UDP different? When may you want to use one over another?

• What is an IP address?

• What is the World Wide Web?

• What is a web browser?

• What is a domain name?

• What is the Domain Name System (DNS)?

• What is a Universal Resource Locator (URL)?

• What is Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)?

• What is HTTPS? Why do almost all websites today use HTTPS over HTTP?

• Why is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript important for making basic websites?

• What is the front end of an application?

• What is the back end of an application?

• What is a server?

• What is a client?

• What is Ethernet?

Operating Systems

• What is an operating system?

• What does Windows, macOS, and Linux have in common?

• What makes Linux different from Windows and macOS?

• What does Android and iOS have in common?

• What operating system dominates personal computers? What operating system is most popular for servers? What operating system is most popular for mobile devices?