Lesson 1 - The computing system: reference architecture. Structure of the processor. Main memory. Hierarchical organization of memory types.
Lesson 2 - Peripherals. Devices for mass storage. Magnetic discs, optical and flash memories. Main devices: videos, keyboards, pointing devices, printers.
Lesson 3 - The operating system: functions, elements and evolution.
Process management. Memory management. Swapping, paging and virtual memory. Device management. File system management. Data localization.
Lesson 4 - Computer networks. Taxonomy of computer networks. Communication systems: source, destination, and channel. Coding and redundancy. Models of network architectures: the ISO-OSI reference model and the TCP/IP standard de facto.
Lesson 5 - The physical infrastructure. Data transmission in local area networks and wide area networks. The connection between networks. IP and TCP layers: operating principles. Numerical and symbolic addresses.
Lesson 6 - Network Applications. The World Wide Web. Distributed Applications. The development of the Internet. The e-mail. Peer- to-peer networks.
Lesson 7 - The treatment of information. Formalization of the concept of information. Information and coding. Information levels and uncertainty. Binary coding for non-numeric and numeric data.
Lesson 8 - Analog vs digital encoding. The digitalization process. Sampling and quantization. Raster and vector representations. Pure and loseless encoding. Pictures, music, voice.
Lesson 9 - Information processing. Problems and algorithms. Some examples of algorithms. Flowcharts. Programs and programming languages: instructions and data .
Lesson 10 - Imperative-procedural programming : an overview. Basic constructs. Iterative and recursive procedures .
Lesson 11 - Languages for the Web: HTML. Web pages, formatting, lists, levels of titlation, images, links, frames, tables, cascading stylesheets, validation.
Lesson 12 - Organization of information. Linear structures: introduction to lists, queues and stacks. Table structures: the example of relational databases. Non-linear structures: trees and graphs.
Lesson 13 - Excel: basic tools, what-if analysis, data tables, advanced functions, graphs, pivot tables.
Lesson 14 - Excel: adding controls to modules, macros, introduction to Visual Basic for Applications.
Lesson 15 - The relational and the conceptual data models. Access: basic tools. Tables. Referential integrity constraints. Queries. Introduction to SQL.
Lesson 16 - Hierarchical structures: fundamentals of XML. The validation of XML documents. The DTD. Introduction to XMLSchema.