Part II of our look at data takes us into more sophisticated structures that are fundamental to computing  - stacks, queues, deques and trees. If you don't know about these four then you are going to find programming tough and you will have to reinvent the wheel to solve otherwise simple problems.

Date and times follow their own regularities - and computers have had to devise ways of handling them.

Finite state machines may sound like a very dry and boring topic but they reveal a lot about the power of different types of computing machine.  Every Turing machine includes a finite state machine so there is a sense in which they come first. They also turn out to be very useful in practice.

Inconvenient though they may be, fractions are the real stuff of number and to work with them we need to know about floating point numbers ...

Genetic Algorithms are currently a hot topic. If this is an unfamiliar concept, or one you are unsure about here's an explanation.

Computational grammar is a subject that is sometimes viewed as a form of torture by computer science students, but understanding something about it really does help ....

How does a hard disk work? Understanding can help you pick your next drive and make you more aware of what can go wrong.

Hashing solves one of the basic problems of computing - finding something that you have stored somewhere.

Hexadecimal is the most common way of displaying the raw data sitting in a machine's memory, but if you are not familiar with it you might ask "What the hex..?"

Error correcting codes are essential to computing and all sorts of communications. At first they seem a bit like magic. How can you possibly not only detect an error but correct it as well? How do they work? In fact it turns out to be very easy to understand their deeper principles.

Exactly how does computer memory work? What is surprising is that  it still works in more or less the same way as when Babbage designed his Analytical Engine or the IBM 360 accessed core memory. So where do all our programs live?

Bitcoin is a new currency that exists entirely in software and is under the control of no central authority. Some claim it will destabilize governments and bring the world economy down - others just think it's the future of money.

We often refer to things that are unpredictable as being "random" but this is not the same as truly random behavior - which is something we have to work hard to achieve. Put another way - how can a logical deterministic device like a computer produce a random number?

Where you store data is as important to the computer as the data itself, yet the importance of the address is often overlooked. In this introduction to the low-level mechanisms of addressing in assembler, it is surprising how easy it is to recognize familiar high-level abstractions.

When it comes to processor architecture we still don’t  have a clear agreement on what sort of design philosophies should be followed.