Topics

ALU, Control Unit, registers (PC, ACC, MAR, MDR, CIR), buses, FDE cycle, Von Neumann vs Harvard architecture

CISC and RISC characteristics, GPUs, parallel systems (SISD, SIMD, MISD, MIMD)

I/O devices, secondary storage types (magnetic, optical, solid state), RAM, ROM, virtual and cloud storage

Operating systems, memory management (paging, segmentation, virtual memory), interrupts, scheduling, BIOS, device drivers, virtual machines

Programming paradigms, compilers, interpreters, assemblers, linkers, loaders, libraries

Development methodologies (waterfall, RAD, agile), testing (unit, integration, black/white box), maintenance types

High vs low level, imperative vs declarative, assembly language, addressing modes (immediate, direct, indirect, indexed)

Lossy and lossless compression, symmetric/asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, certificates, SSL/TLS, hashing for passwords and data integrity

Relational databases, tables, keys, relationships, ER diagrams, normalisation (1NF, 2NF, 3NF), SQL queries, ACID transactions

Network types (PAN, LAN, WAN, VPN), topologies, protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, POP3, IMAP, SMTP), IP addressing, packet switching

HTML structure and presentation, CSS, search engines and PageRank, cookies and security issues

Primitive data types, binary representation of integers (two's complement), fixed and floating point, character sets (ASCII, Unicode), images and sound representation

Arrays (1D and 2D), lists, tuples, records, stacks, queues, trees (binary, BST), graphs, hash tables and collision handling

Logic gates (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, NAND, NOR), truth tables, Boolean expressions, simplification, Karnaugh maps, D-type flip flops

Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR, Computer Misuse Act 1990, Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000

Computers in the workforce, automated decision making, AI accountability, environmental effects, privacy vs surveillance, censorship, software piracy

Nature of abstraction, representational abstraction, generalisation, data and procedural abstraction, devising abstract models

Identifying inputs and outputs, preconditions for solutions, caching and its benefits, reusable program components

Problem decomposition into sub-problems, using sub-procedures, interface design, parameter passing

Identifying decision points, determining logical conditions, understanding decision impact on program flow

Concurrent processing, how it is achieved, benefits and drawbacks of concurrent systems

Variables, constants, operators, inputs, outputs, sequence, selection, iteration, subroutines, recursion, global and local variables, modularity and parameters

Problem recognition, decomposition, divide and conquer, backtracking, data mining, heuristics, performance modelling, pipelining, visualisation

Big O notation and complexity, searching algorithms (linear, binary), sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, insertion, quick), Dijkstra's shortest path, A* algorithm