Object Oriented Programming is about more than just storing custom data types. It is a whole methodology about thinking of how a real life object behaves. What information makes it up and how can it be used within the application. It is about storing data in a manner that is protected from other similar collections…
A pointer is a special type of data type. Instead of storing data, it stores a memory location. At this location is the data. In some languages, like C/C++, they expect the programmer to track and maintain the pointer information, using special references to know if they are storing/retrieving a location for data, or accessing…
A lot of native data types of date/time, numeric, and string fields don’t work when you try to model a lot of real world situations. They are good for a portion of the information, but not all. For example, if I wanted to store information about a player in a computer game, no one of…
We’ve talked about arrays, now let’s look at how they are created in Java. In a general form, you can find something like below: Obviously type would be something like int, float, or even a class name as you can have an array of objects. Declaring an Array This means that the following are ways…
Earlier we talked about issues with storing things, like a phone number as a number, due to overflow and accuracy issues. So, we’re going to institute a general rule of programming. Only store something in a number when you are planning to, or could, perform mathematical operations on that number. So for example, you have…
Most modern languages have some built in complex data types that you can use. Characters and Strings For example most languages have the ability to work with strings and characters. In most languages a character is a single byte or two bytes in size, and can represent a letter, number, or special character like a…
Now that we’ve looked at a Intro to Search and have a basic idea of how a search engine works, now we need to look at what we can do to improve our own search results – i.e. those things that get returned when you type what you want into the search engine. Knowing that…
So we looked in an Intro to Search at why people need to search. But how do search engines work? For example, did you know that Google estimates that they only know about 40% of the web pages out there? But how did they learn about all those other pages? Well, lets look at what…
