Pt1420 Unit 2 Essay

Words: 619
Pages: 3

For the unit 2, I continued the reading of the book “Think Python, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist” by Allen Downey and I learned about variables, expressions and statements. I also continued learning about the history of computer technology by reading the chapter 3 and chapter 4 of the book “A history of the personal computer: the people and the technology”.

From my readings, I learned that computers use different types of informations. For the programming language Python, some types to consider are string, integer, and float. An information is consider a string when this information has characters enclosed in quotation marks such as ‘Bonjour’. An information is an integer if this information is a whole number. When the information is a number with a decimal point, it belongs to the type called floating-point.

I learned that informations that are also considered as values are generally kept in places called variables. The values of a variable may change.
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I have also found helpful to add comments to a program to avoid any confusion.

So far, I feel like I can write my first program because I have learned how to assign values to variables, how to use operators and operands and how to display a result.

I also learned from the Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 in “A history of the personal computer: the people and the technology” the huge impact that microprocessors made to the development of of microcomputers. I never heard about Moore’s law but it was interesting to know that the development of microprocessors follows a certain law. I have found challenging to understand some vocabulary terms related to the performance of microprocessors. It was interesting to know how major companies such as Intel, Motorola and Texas Instrument have started their business and how they became dominant in the sector of