compiler chapter complete!

[song]

wow!! very very good book and lecture!!

[WBahn]

Congratulations!

In many ways, you have completed the hardest part. The Operating System can be challenging for many folks, but the nice thing is that it breaks down into lots of pretty small pieces and concepts. It will also pull the curtain way from a huge fraction of the magic behind stuff programmers take for granted. You'll know how dynamic memory allocation works because you will implement a dynamic memory manager. You'll know how ASCII codes get turned into characters on a screen, because you'll write the routines to do it. You'll know how numerical values get brought in as a string of ASCII codes from the keyboard and sent back out as a sequence of ASCII codes to the screen, because you have to write the functions to do it. Same with graphics. Same with multiplication and division (on platforms, such as smaller embedded microcontrollers, that don't have these instructions in the CPU).

If you thought your understanding of how a computer works as increased dramatically up to this point (and it very probably has), hold onto your hat.