Well... not exactly.  Yes, Virginia, there is a Compiler Claus.

I know I'm harping on this but I'm just going to say it one more time. If you are looking for a fix for your prgramming that's a simple as changing your domain record, this is not it.

Programming is about telling the computer what to do. This is a simple concept that opens a can of worms.

When I was a kid in the 70's the PC revolution hadn't happened yet. People did not have a PC in every home. There was an ad in comic books back then for a computer kit, where you could buy your own computer in a kit and put it together for $99. I was excited and saved up for it, bought it and put it together.  For years I had a box sitting on my shelf in my room that did nothing but sit there and blink lights at me. Not even a monitor of screen.  When people first started buying PC's like the Tandy they pretty much did the same thing. There was no Internet readily available from the phone company and cable was all of three channels. So there was no community on the internet to learn from, and no one to share the things you did on the computer with.

Computers have this thing called a processor. And what this does is execute instructions. That's it. That's all it does. Just take instructions.

They also have this thing called memory. This is just a place where the processor writes and read instructions from. That's it.

Programming is just telling the processor what to do. Store this info in memory.  Read this info in memory. Do something with this info.  That's it. Everything you do from watching video's on YouTube to using the calculator program and every possible thing in between is simply this process, by the processor, of instruction and information in memory.

There are also things like drives, which can store the info and instructions for longer term, but the computer reads things there slower so it loads it in the memory before the processor acts on it.

And the processor works in binary. That's one's and zero's. Everytime you watch a video on vampirefreaks.com its really just ones and zeros.

Can you do programming without caring about this stuff? Sure.

But eventually there will come a point where not knowing this stuff will stop you cold.

So here's task two: Since Google Notebook is dead, go load and install Zotero. Create an account and start by finding one website that talks about how a computer works in binary, and add it to your Zotero Library.

For extra credit create a Google account and share both your link from above and your gmail account with us here. Explore all the apps and such that Google gives you for free. Mention your favorite.

Oh, and if you are realy interested join the Zotero library at:

https://www.zotero.org/groups/behind_the_scenes_programming

and share...