Poised Solutions Tech Library

Coding is the discipline that is pervasive in all IT systems. There is a huge amount of information available on programming languages and the art of coding. The Development Books in the Poised Solutions Tech Library covers a large spectrum of programming languages. Those pursuing the art of development should find a number of interesting Development Books contained within.

Computer coding or programming can be done at various levels of abstraction. The most basic level is machine code; instructions that the CPU uses to run all programs. The second generation languages, one step up from first generational machine code are assembly languages, the mapping to machine code is one to one but the instructions are written using mnemonics.

Up from assembly are third generational languages, which tend to be compiled to native, system languages. The fourth generation languages tend to use virtual machines and interpretors to run the instructions, which gives good cross platform. Shell languages, and SQL used for database access also fall in this category.

Another branch of programming languages are the functional languages, which tend to deal more with the mathematics of computer science, though also tend to be very good with concurrency.

Markup languages are also heavily used, as text requires some context for its display, HTML is perhaps the best known, and XML is used very often to store documents in.

Coding and Programming Library Sections

Assembly

Assembly is considered low level programming, interfacing nearly directly with the CPU. It is important to know assembly programming though as all programs eventually run at the machine code level, and to truly understand how a computer and a program works an appreciation of assembly is essential.

System

System programming refers to producing kernels and low level engines and applications. The C programming language tends to dominate this field, with C++ handling the engine of applications. System languages can be used for higher level tasks where performance is critical though the development life cycle tends to be longer.

General

General programming languages tend to be in the fourth generation, and are dominated by Perl, Python, Lua, and Java. General programming languages solve business and research problems, they often cannot access internals to a system directly though can be made to do so, and offer a plethora of libraries to solve common problems.

GUI

GUI (Graphical User Interface) programming is used to create graphical applications that run inside a window system. Generally GUI refers to full raster pixel control as opposed to character control found in terminal applications, frame buffers can also be used if a full blown windowing system is too much overhead. Cross platform compatibility is a useful feature of a GUI coding platform, and there does exist many different toolkits.

Shell

Shell coding languages allow the quick construction of programs to work together for general administration, development and user tasks. Most shell languages are directly accessible from a command line or combined in a script. Shell programming is perhaps the fastest and most powerful coding, so it is something to research quite deeply, it is a very handy swiss army knife in computer system usage.

Functional

Functional programming has been used in computer science from the very early days, it actually forms a fork of programming style. Functional programming is more akin to writing mathematical formulae to create a program that solves a logical problem. Functional has a lot of advantages to the journey man and expert programmer, concurrency is but one of them, with the use of state machines and lite weight processes, but also in the robustness of code and development times.

Web

Web programming environments are a result of the high interest in the HTTP both for Web sites and Intranets. Web languages allow for the web paradigm in various ways, the best known are PHP, ASP and ColdFusion. General programming languages tend to offer a lot of web libraries, and the web paradigm has been broken down enough to generally go for an application server approach.

Browser

Browser based languages cover markup languages (HTML and XML), distributed client side programming languages (JavaScript) and browser specific languages (XUL Runner). Browsers represent the client side to the web model, and are also used to browse structured local information.

Database

Databases form an essential part of most systems, most computer programs are really concerned with the storage of some changing data and calculation based on that data. SQL is a set based language that is used most often in relational database management systems, though of course other styles of data storage do exists.

Philosophy

It is often said that programming is never really taught it is an innate skill, it certainly is a skill that can be honed, and there are various different philosophies and meta ideas about coding. Is coding engineering or art, perhaps a blend of the two? This section deals with books that explore this element of coding.