What Is The Value Of The Program Counter In The Machine Described In Appendix C Immediately After

How do I become a good programmer in C?

I'm going to start with the things I didn't take too seriously: Internet tutorials, blogs and almost anything brought by Google. I usually considered those sources unreliable and potentially harmful.Like a lot of people in the industry I used to Google way too often. Overtime I found the illusion of speed and the inaccuracy of the answers to be counter-productive.No website is as good as a good book. And no good book is as good as a disassembly output.C Programming Language (aka: K&R) - The classic and first book you should read about C.It will be easy to pick up as it is a 272 pages, 386 grams book. Short and full of well explained code samples it was written by the fathers of the language Kernighan and Ritchie themselves. It is all you need to know about C…for the first few weeks. It is fun to read, keeps things short and will get you going in no time. You will probably skip the Annex A (about obscure things like promotions, decaying, conversions and other useless things) and Annex B about the C Library…and I think it's ok for the beginning. This book makes C appears very small and simple so it is very encouraging to learn.If you keep on practicing and learning you will soon hit some strange situations.Expert C Programming - This book is fantastic because it will bring your attention to what happens under the hood in a very entertaining way.Through numerous bug anecdotes and trivia (mostly NASA based) the reader will be introduced again to integral promotion, subscripting, decaying and many other C marvels. This book is so captivating that you will probably read the 353 pages within a night and be disappointed it was so short.C: A Reference Manual - This is the ultimate C/C89/C99 book. The true cold boring truth that you will deal with from now on. You can put K&R and ECP back on the shelves and keep this one besides the screen monitor. Anything you want to know is there.Source (free pdfs of above books) - To become a good C Programmer

If natural child birth is so painful why do most women opt for it? Instead why not go for cesarean delivery? What are the benefits and costs of natural childbirth?

As a co-founder of International Cesarean Awareness Network, a cesarean mother, and a natural birth mother, I feel that I am qualified to answer this question. I have given birth five times. My first birth was, basically, an unattended hospital birth. The hospital staff didn't think I was in actual labor, so they never called my doctor. He finally called the hospital to see if I had come in. He arrived after I had birthed my daughter. I tore extensively due to poor nutrition and poor positioning. My second child was born by emergency cesarean, weighing one ounce more than her sibling. The surgery went well, and my recovery was uneventful. However, it was six months before I felt back to normal physically.My third child was a VBAC-Vaginal Birth After Cesarean-in a hospital with a family physician. The labor was intense, but I was able to sleep between contractions. My baby was born in one push, and weighed 2 1/2 pounds more than her sisters. I only needed one stitch, and I felt back to normal physically in a week and a half.My last two children were born at home, with midwives attending. Both births were calm and easy, despite my last baby birthing face up. Both home birth babes were 2 pounds bigger than my first two babes. Natural, unmedicated, unmanaged birth is the safest, easiest, least painful way to birth a baby for over 90% of all women. Unfortunately, doctors and hospitals in the USA do not understand this. Doctors want to manage birth, make it faster, more efficient, more convenient. These goals may be helpful to the doctor. They are not helpful to the mother. Birth, in most cases, should not even be considered a medical procedure. It is a natural process, but a delicate one. Mothers cannot labor and birth easily if they are feeling unsafe. Hospitals are inherently scary places filled with beeping machines, gowned and gloved strangers and super germs. No wonder so many labors end up stalling, or even stopping. Which would you prefer-eating a meal of your choosing at your own pace, or having a feeding tube shoved down your throat and proper nutrition pumped directly into your stomach? The tube is very efficient, and the nutrition is more than adequate. I think we would all want the meal, though. Woman would do best birthing in a place of their own choosing, birthing at their own pace.

Why is a memory address register needed if a computer uses a Von Neumann architecture and has a program counter?

I think it is more a technological issue than a fundamental one.Theoretically, a Random-access machine is as powerful as a Turing machine (ignoring any performance and ease of programming issues).However, you need to be able to handle indirection (or indexing): you need to access a memory cell whose address is only known at runtime (you could decide that a given memory cell, e.g. cell#0 can play the role of an index). Without that mechanism, you could also use self-modifying code (and this is how indexes where handled in some 1950s era computers).In the previous century, some computers (1960 era) did not had any register, or had only one: the accumulator, or very few (IBM 7090 …). Even the 32 bits x86 had only 8 registers (including stack pointer!). On Texas Instruments TMS9900 -years 1976 and laters-, the register bank was just a view into RAM (so there was a “register window pointer hold in some accumulator RW”, and register R0 was RW[0] in memory, register R1 was RW[1] in memory, etc…)But on current (desktop, laptop, tablet, server) computers, the RAM is much slower than the registers (typically several hundred times slower: an access to register takes half, or one or two nanoseconds, an access to RAM takes more than a hundred or even 200 or 300 nanoseconds). This is why processor registers and CPU cache is so important. See the appendix of http://norvig.com/21-days.html (a very useful reading) for figures.

How was the first computer code made? A computer needs to be programmed to display the code, but how do you program the computer before it is programmed to display the code on the screen?

The earliest computers had no screens at all. They had some switches, or movable patch wires, and some lights (or later, LEDs) which were hardwired to bits of registers in the CPU. It was literally necessary to machine-code by knowing the numeric code representing a particular CPU operation, set the switches to represent that number, then flip another switch to store that in a particular memory location. Repeat slowly and painfully until you have manually entered a simple program into the computer. Now set the program counter register to the first address of your program, and tell the computer to execute it, then read the results directly out of the registers or memory locations with the lights.As you can see this was a terribly slow and painful way to work with a computer. So the next step was to automate the input process by reading the instructions off of punched paper cards or paper tape, or eventually, magnetic tape, and also to allow text output to a teletype machine.Even as computer technology has progressed, early bring-up of new electronics designs that are not built from off the shelf ready-to-go parts frequently begins with very low level serial communication through a JTAG port or similar to ensure that the base components are powering up and able to communicate with each other. This kind of work typically goes on for quite a while before getting anywhere near the point of lighting up visual displays and putting characters or icons onto them.

What should a disaster recovery plan include?

The three keys to any disaster recovery plan:• Easy to implement and follow. It needs to be a plan that anyone can follow, in case your expert is out of the office. A simple plan also reduces the chances of something else going wrong (the last thing you need).• Redundancy. Save your information in different ways and different places. For example, if something happens that affects your geographical location, your data backed up on the cloud is still accessible, but physical copies might not be. Also, backups (even if they’re tested) can still fail. It’s always good to have a backup of the backup.• Round-the-clock availability. Disasters are rarely polite enough to schedule themselves ahead of time. Make sure you can implement your plan at any time.If you want to dig deeper, download our popular Disaster Recovery Plan Template.