Pancyprian Computer Science - independent foundations cheat sheet

Recursion needs a base case and progress toward that base case.

Overloading uses different signatures; overriding replaces an inherited method.

Unit tests isolate units; integration tests combine them.

Short-circuit evaluation can skip the right operand.

Pass-by-value copies arguments; pass-by-reference can mutate the caller's object.

Decomposition breaks problems down; abstraction removes irrelevant detail.

Binary search requires sorted data and is O(log n).

Merge sort is O(n log n) worst case; bubble sort is O(n^2).

Trace tables prevent guessing about loop output.

Update search bounds to mid + 1 or mid - 1, not mid.

Fetch-decode-execute uses the PC, IR, ALU, and registers.

Memory hierarchy: registers, cache, RAM, storage, offline.

RAM is volatile; SSDs retain data without power.

A process has its own address space; threads share one.

Authentication verifies identity; authorization grants permissions.

TCP is reliable and connection-oriented; UDP is connectionless and lower overhead.

IP addresses route between networks; MAC addresses work on the local link.

A /26 subnet has 64 addresses and 62 usable hosts.

DNS resolves names; DHCP assigns addresses.

Security protects data; privacy governs collection and use.

Primary keys are unique and non-null; foreign keys enforce referential integrity.

WHERE filters rows before grouping; HAVING filters aggregated groups.

COUNT(*) counts rows; COUNT(column) skips NULL values.

LEFT JOIN preserves unmatched left rows; INNER JOIN removes them.

Precision = relevant retrieved / retrieved; recall = relevant retrieved / all relevant.