We kicked off the day with a brief visit from Mike Dussault, a game programmer at Valve.  You asked him some great questions ranging from his educational background (some college, no degree) to when he gets in to work (flexible schedule, generally between 11am and 3pm).  I’ll try to bring in other interesting industry practitioners through the semester so you can get a feel for the software industry.

I gave you a short open-notes quiz to test your understanding of classes, methods and expressions.  I said that while I would look over this one, I wouldn’t grade it but that you would be getting quizzes every couple of weeks or so.  It looked like there was still some confusion over flow control — remember, a Java program must have a main method to be executable and execution will always start with the first statement in main and run sequentially down main.

We then launched into a somewhat confusing discussion of binary.  I talked about how at the hardware level, every piece of information is represented as a series of bits or binary units.  Bits have two possible states: either on or off.  We practiced converting from decimal to binary and back.  You can refresh your memory by reading this document and trying the exercises.  I talked a little bit about representing text in binary using ASCII, Unicode and other standards.

I hope this brief introduction to binary will help you better understand how computers work and what is going on when you write code.

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