Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
How Software Works: The Magic Behind Encryption, CGI, Search Engines, and Other Everyday Technologies by V. Anton Spraul August 2015, 216 pp. ISBN: 978-1-59327-666-9
The book starts with some basic encryption stuff, showing how you can swap numbers and letters, and such like, but, in no time, it’s showing you AES encryption and discussing block chains.
With passwords, it’s not about creating a password, or anything like that; it’s about keeping passwords safe. Making sure that they’re not compromised while being passed from you to the server, and things like that. Something that’s definitely required, but not something I’d ever considered before.
Web security is almost a combination of the previous two (encryption and passwords), but it, of course, uses RSA encryption. Like the previous chapters, we’re shown complicated stuff using tables and diagrams. Which is helpful for the more visual learner.
Next comes movie CGI. This really threw me for a loop. This chapter seems totally out of place. It does, very briefly, discuss a couple of old effects (such as mattes), but it’s mostly dedicated to CGI as we all know from Jurassic Park.
Another oddity. Game graphics. Like the preceding chapter, this one does briefly discuss old school pixel stuff, but this is mostly rendering and more modern stuff.
I think the problem with these two chapters is that the stage was set by the first three chapters (encryption, passwords, and web security). Placing CGI and games after those three is quite jarring.
Now we’re back on track with data compression, Huffman encoding, binary, tables of numbers, and even some graphs! Of course, you can’t end data compression without looking at our old friend – the JPG.
No, you won’t get to see Google’s secret sauce in this chapter on search. This starts focusing on data sorting and the kind of search you’d use in searching for files on your desktop, or within files. But then it does lead into how search engines get their data, and how it’s served up in a manner that gives you the best to worst results.
Second-to-last chapter is on concurrency. This is how data is quickly stored and retrieved. It’s how data is kept in an order where things don’t get mixed up.
Lastly we have map routes. This is one that I hadn’t read about before and was pleasantly surprised to have this chapter. How does your GPS come to a particular route. How can it pick the shortest route (in miles) or the quickest route (in time)?
Conclusion
This is a great little book with very interesting information. It’s good to know what’s happening in the background when something is encrypting, or you’re doing a Google search. I have to drop a point for jumping to CGI (and, to a lesser extent, game graphics) as, while it is something we see quite often, it’s not something most of us will actually use. If they had to be kept, it might have been better to put them at the end to keep things flowing better.