When working with a very large list of items, you might want to use a weighted search. One where instead of jumping to the middle, you try to get closer to your choice. Consider you had list with values between 1 and 10,000,000, and you were looking for an item with a value of 8,536,324….
If our data is presorted then a binary search starts to make a lot of sense. It is like the guessing game we mentioned earlier where you need to find a number between 1 and 100. No one asks for 1 then 2 then 3… until they find it. Instead we ask for the mid…
A brute force method of searching is slow and inefficient from a run-time perspective. However, it is relatively fast to write. With a brute force search, you scan through every item in a list until you find the element. As you can imagine, scanning through every item can be a time consuming process, especially if…
Computer Programmers are used to working with a multi-tier system to bring efficiencies to the user and system. These complex systems break apart a program into three or more tiers usually. There is a data tier, a business logic tier, and a display tier. Depending upon your view, there are a couple of ways to…
A web page is a single file which contains a document following the HTML specification. It may reference external files to bring in design elements, multimedia elements, and script files. Typically this file will have an extension of either .html or .htm. On most web servers, web pages and other resources are case sensitive. Windows…
Version 4 and prior of HTML was a little “wild west” in how it was interpreted and defined. It wasn’t always consistent in how it was implemented or interpreted, and sloppy interpreters allowed lots of pages with errors displayed things differently. At one point it was estimated that 98% of all web pages had at…
On one end, some languages are “type-less” languages, meaning that they don’t have data types. Examples include COBOL, Python, JavaScript, and more, however, they usually do have them, they just hide the type from us which can dynamically change as the program runs depending upon how the data is being used. One the other end…
Complex data types are usually classes. Some might be supplied by the language, while others are user defined. Complex data types have methods built in for working with the data, libraries that come with the language (potentially) and will vary from language to language on how they are stored and handled. The types of data…
