lloyd.io is the personal website of Lloyd Hilaiel, a software engineer who lives in Denver, Colorado.

Content here is available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Icons from Phosphor Icons. Typeset in Lexend and Lekton. Built with Jekyll. Source on GitHub.

A breadth-first attempt at learning about programming and computers
2009-09-03

A set of questions that can be used as a jump off point for discussions and learning about computers the internet, and programming.

Theory Questions:

  1. What is assembly language?
  2. What’s the difference between a compiled and interpreted programming language?
  3. At a very high level, how do computers communicate over a network?
  4. what is the “emacs vs vi” discussion? What are emacs and vi?
  5. What is SSH? What is telnet? Why is ssh better than telnet?

Programming Questions:

  1. find and download emacs for windows.
  2. How do you delete a line?
  3. How do you go to the next line
  4. How do you paste the line you deleted above?
  5. How would you go to line 222 of a file?
  6. How do you save a file? 6 How do you create a new file?
  7. What is the ruby programming language? (use wikipedia, dude)
  8. What is ruby rails? Why are people so excited about ruby rails?
  9. download and install the ruby interpreter http://ruby-lang.org
  10. write a “hello world” program (first you have to figure out what that is) use emacs to do this

Database Questions

  1. What is SQL? What is it used for?
  2. How is information organized in a relational database?
  3. (challenge) Read and summarize the first chapter of “Data Base Design”

Unix questions

  1. You are going to need an ssh client for windows. I suggest “putty”, find it and download it
  2. create a an account on freeshell.org
  3. you’ll find emacs on freeshell, probably
  4. read and summarize the key ideas of the first chapter of “Learning the bash shell”. In your own words, what is bash and what does it do for you?
  5. figure out how to log into freeshell using ssh (putty) and how to set your shell to bash (the chsh command should help) type “man chsh” to get a MANual page of the ‘chsh’ command
  6. write a “hello world” program in bash shell (you’ll need emacs). using the web for help is perfectly fine here.

Web Questions

  1. What is HTML and how does it work?
  2. How is HTML related to XML?
  3. What is “javascript” and why is it considered a “web technology”?
  4. What is CSS and what is it used for?
  5. use your freeshell account to make yourself a website.