Back to Basics

My journey begins with the Google IT Support Professional Certificate. This certificate is designed to teach the skills required to be able to succeed in an entry level IT job. I have decided to complete this course as I would like to build a solid foundational knowledge of IT. I would say my current knowledge is limited at best and a hell of a long way off being able to collect and analyse digital evidence from cyberattacks. So here we are...

The course consists of 5 areas:

1. Technical Support Fundamentals
2. The Bits and Bytes of Networking
3. Operating Systems and You: Becoming a Super User
4. System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services
5. IT Security: Defense Against the Dark Arts (I'm looking forward to getting to this stage!)

I have begun the first course - technical support fundamentals - which aims to teach different areas of IT, such as computer hardware, the Internet, computer software, troubleshooting, and customer service. It is delivered over 6 modules and so I think I will aim to do a blog post after completing each module as a way to reflect on my learning, recapping the learning objectives and reinforcing my new knowledge.

Hence, this blog post can only mean one thing...I 've completed my first module! This module was an introduction to IT and the learning objectives were:

• To understand how & why humans went from counting using manual methods to calculating data with computers
• To describe what binary is & how we use it to communicate with computers
• To understand what the layers of computer architecture are
• To convert binary numbers into decimal form

In this module I learnt about the history of computing; how we went from an abacus to analytical engines, and how cryptography and advancing technology paved the way for modern computers, eventually leading to the creation of operating systems such as Windows and Linux.

I also learnt about computer language, the binary system and how character encoding enables us to read binary using standards such as ASCII and UTF-8, as well as how to count in binary.

Finally, I learnt the concept of abstraction and the four layers of computer architecture from hardware to the user. Overall I found this module quite interesting and enjoyed beginning to understand how computers actually work, not just "oh I click this and that happens" 😂.

On to the next module...HARDWARE!!

Dave