What our teachers don't tell us in school is that we will spend most of our scientific or engineering career in front of computers, trying to beat them into submission. My formal training in computational science is nil, which I suspect is true of 90 percent of the scientists and engineers in the world. In this book, I attempt to bring together in one place the very basic facts that every technical person should know about computers. The computers of today still require you to know quite a bit about them in order to use them effectively for technical data analysis. Scientists and engineers...