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How Computers Really Work
book

How Computers Really Work

by Matthew Justice
December 2020
Beginner
380 pages
10h 54m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from How Computers Really Work

2BINARY IN ACTION

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In the previous chapter we defined a computer as an electronic device that can be programmed to carry out a set of logical instructions. We then learned at a high level how everything in a computer, from the data it uses to the instructions it carries out, is stored in binary, 0s and 1s. In this chapter, I shed some light on how exactly 0s and 1s can be used to represent nearly any kind of data. We also cover how binary lends itself to logical operations.

Representing Data Digitally

So far, we’ve focused on storing numbers in binary. More specifically, we covered how to store the positive integers, sometimes called whole numbers, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781098128227Errata Page