Beginning
Tutorial the zeroth
What you need, what this set of tutorials will teach you, and what you should already know.
- A computer, typing skills, can read
- it'll teach you the minimum level of computer sophistication everyone should know
- So let go of what you know (aside from what we need you to know)
- we assume that you are willing to look up what we dont' tell you
Tutorial the First - Computer care
General no-brainer tips for everyone.
- What is a computer comprised of?
- How should you set it up? (next to a power source)
- Monitor - the thing you see
- The case
- wires
- Various pieces of hardware
- mice, keyboard
- speakers
- printer
- modem or internet connection
Tutorial the Second - Basic Computer Tasks
A step into the software aspect
- windows
- What a window is comprised of
- The wider view - desktop, my computer, settings
- folder/files (file types), properties/shortcuts
- software - start menu, quick launch, system tray (include run)
- common shortcuts - C-c, C-v, C-p etc
- software side - defrag, cleaning up a harddrive, uninstalling unneeded programs
- touch on software side performance
- Something fun - installing font files
Tutorial the Third - Using programs
Without programs, computers are useless - distinction between the os and the programs
- browser-face it, most people use computers in their free time for the internet, ie7/firefox/opera
- Text-suites to do work, word/oo.org
- images-photos and stuff paint/gimp/photoshop
- audio/video-Window media player, itunes,
- im-talk to friends, gaim/trillian / msn,yahoo,aol,gtalk , irc
- mail-outlook
- blender
- other stuff - 7 zip
Tutorial the Fourth - The blue screen of death
How to recover from errors, serious and trivial
- A stupid javascript run - how to get out of it
- a run away script - ctrl alt delete
- Freezing, and no ctrl alt delete - hard reset
- Power failure - unless you're foolhardy like me, restart in safe mode, or boot down before a big storm, until we get underground powerlines
- Backups - restore points and backup cds (lifetime of cds)
- Getting an aggressive virus - wait for a patch, or wipe the hard drive. Or, go in with a linux boot disk and try to kill it in the registry and everywhere
- backup hard drives - a good idea, but you might want to use cds/dvds anyways - external hard drives, raid
Tutorial the Fifth - A series of tubes
Start off with the misconceptions - series of tubes, too many apps, etc
- Connections - a network
- client
- servers
- urls, html (breif definition and overview)
- search engines
- email
- list community portals (yahoo, etc) - fun
Tutorial the Sixth - external hardware
What do you do with it? - drivers
- printers, especially linking it over a network
- External harddrives
- modems, ethernet, wireless cards
- flash/jump drives
- Scanners
- Web cams
Tutorial the Seventh - Practicing safe stuff
Internet safety
- Spyware, adware
- Viruses / worms
- Phishing
- Hackers
- Bundled software - exe in general
- rootkits
Cool
The next level up - becoming aquainted with your computer
Prelude
How the computer works - not how to use it
Level Pond Scum - Okay, but how does the internet REALLY work?
- IP adresses (IP4 IP6) and DNS servers (ping, my ip), NAT
- How IM clients work
- blogs, feeds (how they work)
- Example - game servers
- How bittorrent works
- GNUtella - how non-centered networks work
- 100$ laptops - mesh networks
Level Hit Man - Security
Iterate - use a firewall and virus scan
- How hackers operate
- Why firewalls work
- How virus scans work
- Why you still need to be careful
- A special note to ie 6 users, or a historical warning - activex
- Some more vectors - cross site scripting (applets, to a lesser extent) and unsecured networks (wireless)
Level Doh! - Doing more hardware stuff
Doing surgery.
- I think lance should write this one
Level Scaly Reptile - How music works
A quick rundown on music - rarefractions and inflections (?)
- wav encoding - raw, number by number encoding (44100) samples
- mp3 - compression, lossy
- aac, wmv - protected, as with many things, can be cracked
- Equalizers - most music playing works that way
- Concept of buffering, especially in streaming content
Level Low Life - Graphics in General
How you represent graphics - raster or vectors, resolution, bit depths
- bitmaps - uncompressed
- svg - a vector thingie
- jpegs - lossy compression
- png - non-lossy compression - then what gets thrown out the window?
- gifs - deprecated
- A little primer on colorspaces, masks
Level Bill Gates - Video specifically
Images and sound - Uploading to YouTube?
- Mechanics - matching up sound and 30 fps movies
- Movie files, or constituent files (images, wav)
- Movie maker - bad~
- mpg format - related to mp3
- formats and codecs - divx, etc
- aspect ratio, widescreen, hd res,
- flash movies~
Level Beauracrat - Publish your stuff
Taking advantage of the web
- learning html
- css
- style no-nos: flash, unless you know what you are doing, or you're youtube, animated gifs, low contrast, "mystery meat navigation", size (large images)
- Layout of the site, navigation, broken links
- finding services - how to upload (ftp) or web interface
- making your site accesible to others - advertising, putting up good content. Get someone to make a dyn site for you, or you might want a blog. plenty of those around
- Touch on latex, web 2.0
Level Superman - stuff that you can talk to nerds about
To be a true nerd... if you don't want to be one, just skip this
- the true history of computing
- PIeces of computer lore
- you must revere google - a quick history
- gaming - warcraft, hl2
- history with rgards to ai, cause that's the first thing that lots of people think of in connection with computer nerds
- what are the major players in computing right now?
- what's the view on supercomputing? what's a flop?
- it - lotsa computer nerds don't think about it, but they should - outsourcing
- random stuff you just need to know - l33t speak, ftw, techno, the lingo in general, net neutrality and slashdot(?)
God
programming
Overview of Languages
The mother of all languages - machine code (picture of punch card)
- Early languages - ada, basic, cobol, fortran
- Lisp - different
- Smalltalk
- C
- C++ and Java
- Python and Perl
- Ruby - recent and growing
- Javascript - a class of it's own
jscript
- syntax
- a dirty example
- variables, assignment, math, defining functions, type (static/dynamic,weak/strong), (overloading,recursive)
- Loops - various tricks
- io in fles, sockets,
- Including files, linking to libraries
- OO programming
- A working example - do something useful
- parting note - just dive into the local scene, and make programs for open souce before trying out commerical, or go to school. look on sourceforge
Java
total oo
C++
pointers
text encoding - why c uses numbers - ascii, utf-8, other esoteric stuff like utf-21
perl - cgi
- Basic CGI
- Touch on fastcgi
- Javascript through DHTML, brief touch
- Form validation in both cgi and javascript - ex
- AJAX - Using javascript for google-like stuff
- writing requests, client side (server side is very complicated?)
- Java applets - point to java specs
Lisp
lexical variables, macros
Euclid - How your computer plots against you
The inner workings of the beast
- What happens after you hit power - a diagram, boot sector, bios, cpu (register), memory, hd, peripherals
- what is a byte? how is it ordered? that 32 bit and 64 bit stuff?
- how programs run - instructions (include some assembler, or machine code), interrupts
- os - api (what programs really run on top of)
Little Black Box
Command line
- moving around - cd, dir
- netstat, ping, ipconfig
- running programs in the shell, the path variable
- cygwin? - expand on the real command line?
- We lied: we're also going to talk about the task manager
- Processes - look at the taskmanager, pipes
- threads within the process
Databases
SQL
- mysql, postgre, etc
- getting into your sql server
- creating databases, destroying them, moving around
- adding things, changing things
- coming back a day later - how to access it
- some things like views?
What makes an application?
Bundled programs
- The actual exe/com
- Dll's
- Libraries
- config files
- the appropriate registry settings
- how to use the registry/what it is
- install shield - the stuff people see
Bill Gates - What else can we teach you?
Relax! You can take on nearly anything now!
- touch on 64 kb demos - if zach wants to, he can make one = D
- linux, unix, bsd
- people behind the site
- Parting words