This book is a tour through the world of computing. We explore how computers work—what they do and how they do it, from bottom to top, inside and out. Like an orchestra, a computer system is a collection of many different elements, which combine to form a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. This chapter provides the big picture, giving an overview of the pieces that we slowly dissect throughout the book and putting those pieces into historical perspective.

Hardware, software, programming, web surfing, and email are probably familiar terms to you. Some of you can define these and many more computer-related terms explicitly, whereas others may have only a vague, intuitive understanding of them. This chapter gets everyone on relatively equal footing by establishing common terminology and creating the platform from which we will dive into our exploration of computing.