What you'll learn

Have you ever wondered exactly why displaying the contents of memory often gives strange-looking numbers like 0x38FF that contain letters? Or puzzled over a time when your code added two floating point numbers but the result wasn't quite correct? If so, then this is the course for you. It aims to teach you the mathematics behind how computers store and manipulate numbers and booleans. You'll learn, amongst other things, how to read binary and hexadecimal numbers, and why floating point numbers are almost always stored with small errors and how to estimate how big those errors are. You'll find out how to simplify complex logical expressions, or how to use logical operators and bitwise flags to very efficiently store and manipulate sets of true/false properties. The course also features lots of advice on best practices for working with numerical and boolean data. Underpinning all this, you'll learn how to see your data the way a computer sees it. And that, when your job involves writing or debugging code that manipulates millions of bytes of data, is a very useful skill to have.