uccser/cs-field-guide

# Beyond speed

Computer science isn't just about speed.
Try using the following two calculators to make a simple calculation.
They both have the same functionality (they can do the same calculations), but which is nicer to use? Why?

(This book has many interactives like this.
If the calculators don't work properly, you may need to use a more recent browser.
The interactive material in this book works in most recent browsers; Google Chrome is a particularly safe bet.)

{interactive slug="awful-calculator" type="in-page"}

The second calculator above is slower, and that can be frustrating.
But it has a fancier interface — buttons expand when you point to them to highlight what you're doing.
Does this make it easier to use? Did you have problems because the "C" and "=" keys are so close?

How interfaces work is a core part of computer science.
The aesthetics — images and layout — are important, but what's much more crucial is the psychology of how people interact.
For example, suppose the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons in dialogue boxes were occasionally reversed.
You would always need to check carefully before clicking on one of them, instead of using the instinctive moves you've made countless times before.
There are some very simple principles based on how people think and behave that you can take advantage of to design systems that people love.

Making software that can scale up is another important theme.
Imagine you've built a web interface and have attracted thousands of customers.
Everything goes well until your site goes viral overnight, and you suddenly have millions of customers.
If the system becomes bogged down, people will become frustrated waiting for a response, and tomorrow you will have no customers — they’ll all have moved on to someone else's system.
But if your programs are designed so they can scale up to work with such large amounts of data your main problem will be dealing with offers to buy your company!

Some of these problems can be solved by buying more equipment, but that can be an expensive and wasteful option (not just for cost, but because of the impact on the environment, including the wasted power used to do the processing inefficiently).
With mobile computing it's even more important to keep things lean and efficient — heavy duty programs chew up valuable battery life, and processing and memory must be used sparingly as these affect the size, weight and even heat dissipation of devices.

If your system is successful and becomes really popular, pretty soon people will be trying to hack into it to steal valuable customer data or passwords.
How can you design systems so that you know they are secure from such attacks and your customers can trust you with their personal information or business transactions?

All these questions and more are addressed by the field of computer science.
The purpose of this guide is to introduce you to those ideas so that you have a better idea of whether this field is for you.
It is aimed at high-school level, and is intended to bring you to the point where you have a good overview of the field, and are well prepared for further in-depth study to become an expert.

We've broken computer science up into a whole lot of topics that you'll often find in curricula around the world, such as algorithms, human-computer interaction, compression, cryptography, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence.
The reality is that all these topics interact, so be on the lookout for the connections.

This guide isn't a list of facts for you to memorise, or to copy and paste into projects!
It is mainly a guide to things you can do — experiences that will engage you with the topics.
In fact, we won't go through all the topics in great detail, but will give you references to websites and books that explain things thoroughly.
The idea of this guide is to give you enough background to understand the topics, and to do something meaningful with them.