Course teached as: 0105674 - ABILITA' INFORMATICHE 3-years First Cycle Degree (DM 509/99) in SCIENZE NATURALI
Course Content
Physical structure of the computer; external de-vices; storage. Data and information. Number representation; operations. ASCII code. Pixel representation and colors. Sampling. Data ma-nipulation. Security. Privacy: passwords and en-cryption. Compression. Propositional logic. Ma-chine language. Programming languages. Algo-rithms and data structures. Search binary trees. Complexity and computability. Untractable and undecidable problems.
1)At URL: http://www.dsi.unifi.it/~resp/appunti.htm, sono disponibili gli appunti di “Alfabetizzazione Informatica”
2)Paolo Tosoratti “Introduzione all’Informatica” Casa Editrice Ambrosiana
3)Curtin, Foley, Sen, Morin “Informatica di ba-se” McGraw-Hill
4)Sciuto, Buonanno, Mari “Introduzione ai si-stemi informatici” McGraw-Hill
Learning Objectives
Knowledge acquired: Physical and logical structure of computers.
Competence acquired Knowledge of the physical and logical structure of computers. Main algorithms concerning security, privacy and data compression. Knowledge of basic data structure and algorithms. Some notions of theoretical computer science.
Skills acquired (at the end of the course): To have familiarity with the main concepts of Computer Science.
Teaching Methods
Total hours of the course (including the time spent in attending lectures, seminars, private study, examinations, etc...): 75
Hours reserved to private study and other indivual formative activities: about 50
Contact hours for: Lectures (hours): 24
Further information
Office hours:
Always (to be agreed by e-mail)
Type of Assessment
Oral examination
Course program
Physical structure of computers. Internal organiza-tion: main storage, central processing unit, connec-tions with the exterior world. Input devices; output devices. Converters. Mass storage. Magnetic and op-tical discs; input and output. Data in information. Numerical data: the positional representation; the binary system. Operations: the four elementary op-erations and the comparisons in the base 2 system. Numbers and words; the ASCII code for characters; standard representation and extensions. Graphical and sound data. Pixel representation and colour con-ventions; sampling. Data manipulation. Data secu-rity. Malfunctioning and twin computers. Privacy: passwords and encryption. Classical methods and public key encryption.. Redundancy and compres-sion. Huffman method and LZW. Hardware. Pro-positional logic (Boole): connectives and how they are realized. The machine language: its characteris-tics. Programming languages: the first three genera-tions. Imperative and declarative programming. Al-gorithms and data structures. Basic algorithms: se-quential and binary searching. Sorting. Binary search trees (BST). Searching and sorting in BST’s. Decidable and undecidable problems. Tractable and untractable problems.