Binary Code Easy? Is it useful?

[urdailywater]

Hey all.

For a while I've been helping out with audio / transitioning for the announcements at my school. For some reason my teacher basically "fired" me from that job and put me in a one person class that requires me to read a textbook all the time and learn computer languages and how they operate. This is probably because last year I had the same class, I'm just in the same class but working on the next level.

I'm kind of wanting to get out of it but don't want to at the same time. The teacher expects so much from me and last year I did nothing but set up the T.V. show for my school and thats it. Never learned anything about computers or was told to try and understand it.

Has anyone ever worked with programming codes and can tell me learning it is easy (or at least the basics)? I don't wanna stay in the class next semester if it's going to be insanely hard..

 

[SkylerOcon]

Binary code is simple. It consisits of two numbers, one and zero. One starts a new number. Such as, 11 wouldn't be 'eleven' it would be 'one', 'one'. For every zero put after a one, the number increases in value one time. Such as, 10 does not read 'ten', but instead 'two'.

Or at least, that's my understanding of it.

 

[Overload]

You should learn it, very useful.
Right now I'm learning BASIC which is pretty much one of the simplest game programming languages.
Once you learn one language it makes learning the others much easier.

 

[Goldberg]

There's 10 kinds of people, those who know binary and those who don't.

You must know binary for something like ASM, but programming on a different level language is way easier and I doubt you'll have issues with something like C (if you like to solve problems).

 

[Engel]

Binary code is simple. It consisits of two numbers, one and zero. One starts a new number. Such as, 11 wouldn't be 'eleven' it would be 'one', 'one'. For every zero put after a one, the number increases in value one time. Such as, 10 does not read 'ten', but instead 'two'.

Or at least, that's my understanding of it.

Eh, not exactly....

"0" = 0
"1" = 1
"10" = 2
"11" = 3
"100" = 4
"1000" = 8
"10000" = 16
"100000" = 32
"1000000" = 64

I hope you all can figure out the pattern from that >_>
Basic math on binary numbers isn't too difficult... learn it if you want. Binary is obviously very important in the world of computers and all but if you're just learning some basic languages you'd probably start out with some simple stuff in higher level languages like c++/java which wouldn't require much if any binary knowledge. Basic stuff in c++/java shouldn't be too difficult

 

[GoldShadow]

Binary code is simple. It consisits of two numbers, one and zero. One starts a new number. Such as, 11 wouldn't be 'eleven' it would be 'one', 'one'. For every zero put after a one, the number increases in value one time. Such as, 10 does not read 'ten', but instead 'two'.

Or at least, that's my understanding of it.

Binary, as the name implies, is a base-two system (as opposed to our traditional base-10 system). If you learn how to read different base systems, then it becomes relatively easy to read any base system (I'm not a big computer science/programming person so I don't really know of many other commonly used bases, except hexadecimal).

The last digit of a number is (base)^0, the second to last digit is (base)^1, the third to last digit is (base)^2, and so on.

To use a base-10 example:

143

The last digit is 3*(10)^0, or 3. The second to last digit, 4, is 4*(10)^1, or 40. The third to last digit is 1, or 1*(10)^2, or 100. Add the three up, and you get 100+40+3, or 143.

Similarly, in binary (base-2), let's pick the number 1001
The last digit is 1*(2)^0, or 1. The second to last digit is 0*(2)^1, which is zero. The third to last digit is 0*(2)^2, which is also zero. The fourth to last digit is 1*(2)^3, or 8. Adding these up, we have 8+0+0+1, which is 9 in our base-10 system.

I'm not sure if binary as it's used in code is different, but that's the way to convert from one base to another.

 

[Goldberg]

Converting from Binary to Hex (and the other way around too):

0000=0
0001=1
0010=2
0011=3
0100=4
0101=5
0110=6
0111=7
1000=8
1001=9
1010=A
1011=B
1100=C
1101=D
1110=E
1111=F

Since you can't just type 1's and 0's to make programs, and the CPU understands things in hex, this is actually very very useful.

 

[Nintendood]

lol. im in my programming class right now. We work with Turbo Pascal 7.0. Its pretty simple, if you understand the concept that computers only do what you tell them to. Wikipedia helps out with that a lot.

 

[Kirby King]

Binary is obviously very important in the world of computers and all but if you're just learning some basic languages you'd probably start out with some simple stuff in higher level languages like c++/java which wouldn't require much if any binary knowledge. Basic stuff in c++/java shouldn't be too difficult

I actually recommend learning something low-level like C before going into C++/Java (especially C++, you might as well learn C first if you're going to do C++). Simple stuff in C won't be much more difficult than simple stuff in C++ or Java, and it's a much better foundation for going forward and looking at other languages than starting with something high level.

 

[GreenKirby]

Hexadecimal > Decimal > Binary >>>> Octal >>>>Quaternary

 

[ChileNess]

"my head explode"

 

[BrawlBro]

your probably not learning binary code itself as much as your going to learn something like C, C++, Java which just use binary code...

As for how difficult, it really depends on what your trying to do with it, or what your trying to program.

 

[JLynn943]

I had to learn C++ for a class. It was pretty much a waste of my time though, as I'm never going to use it again and barely remember how to do simple code anymore.