Coding MS Study Guide

Overview
Computer Hardware
Encodings
Units of Measure
Firmware
How Programming Languages work
Programming Languages
Variable Types
Specific Coding Terms
General Coding Terms
Internet
Operating Systems

Overview

This guide was created for the Coding MS challenge. Answer the questions for practice. Don’t worry too much about this. You just need a general idea of all these things. Around 70% knowledge and you should pass easily.

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 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 different 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 if else 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?