Talk:A-level Computing 2009/AQA

Contributors

 * User:pluke
 * User:Jamesgreenwood

To do List
create a general hints and tips page
 * do not round the 1s and 0s off numbers, if the question asks for 8 bits or uses 8 bits in it, answer in 8 bits!
 * do not use brand names in answering questions, give a generic answer such as office software, NOT MS Office

I have started this page as an appendix

I found this wikibook whilst contemplating creating my own wikibook for the HIGCSE Computer Studies curriculum, which I teach at a local school. My thought is to co-develop the book with my students. It would make more sense, though to collaborate on this wikibook, provided it is not intended to be totally A-Level specific. Since I am not familiar with the A-level syllabus, I can't even attempt to guess.

Is it going to be possible to generalise this text to cover A, AS and H(I)GCSE? or would it be better for me to start something different?


 * I think it would be best to keep the books separate (as they cover different syllabuses), but they can (and, from what you're saying, probably should) borrow heavily from each other. If you code into a page the text the Main Page (as updated from time to time) will appear on that page. This allows you to borrow and share whole pages of the wikibook, if desired. I don't know much about computing, and I don't know what HIGCSE is, but it's perfectly reasonable, to have a page HIGCSE Computing/Processing and Programming Techniques/Operating Systems that only contains the text , Jguk 09:40, 17 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I started this page and am planning to put a lot of work into it over the next year as i cover the course with my students. I would love to hear what modules your course comprises of and see if we can share any chapters.  Would be great to have some more people working on this --Pluke 20:31, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I will be doing the A-Level course from 2006-8 on GNU/Linux, so hopefully I can contribute to the LAMP section (I am planning to use a similar system for one of the projects.) I also have some ideas for possible projects, and I would like to keep UNIX methods (such as ./configure and make to compile a custom project from the source) on this technical course. Uncle Lemon 20:03, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I will be teaching this syllibus next year (after a few years of edexcel). I plan to encorage my students to contribute. if other teachers out their want to collaberate, please get in touch. As a department we are planning to use MS Access for the AS project and Visual Basic for the A2 project. Any advice is welcome.. especially for the AS project. --Joe mc h 22:34, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Useful Links
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/default.stm
 * synthesizer

Syntax highlighting?
I imagine that the marvellous syntax highlighting extension at Wikibooks is very helpful to students. However, do AQA and OCR include syntax highlighting in the printed program listings in the exam papers? If so not, could this black-and-white presentation disorient or disadvantage students who are used to relying on syntax highlighting in their editors and textbooks? --InfantGorilla (discuss • contribs) 14:59, 31 January 2012 (UTC)


 * A very interesting question. When I get around to finishing the programming section I might set all the questions with no highlighting.  Also, I'm working on a printable version of the book that will probably be black and white.  Pluke (discuss • contribs) 15:32, 31 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a useful compromise. I imagine the printable version will render the coloured text in grayscale, unless you set a rendering option to force it all to be black and white, which will probably work better on older printers or for readers with poor eyesight. --InfantGorilla (discuss • contribs) 16:17, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Unicode
The UTF table on the unicode page has various comfusions about lengths. Whilst 256 is the number of values in a 8 bit variable, UTF-8 uses 1 byte for the first 128 values and multiple bytes for higher values. It is designed to have a maximum of 34359738367 with 6 bytes to match UTF-16. UTF-16 can use two or four bytes depending on value. The Textbook only talks about UCS-2 which is a far simpler encoding. Would it be better to refactor the page into just UCS 2, provide more explenation or remove the lengths. 31.222.208.187 (discuss) 13:00, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, thanks for raising this. I'm keen to keep the other formats in there to give as full an overview of the format as possible. I'll take a look and respond more fully in the next few days.  I see you have been editing a few pages, thanks for the help.  Are you based in the UK?  Please feel free to register a user account, it gives you lots of options with editing.  Thanks Pluke (discuss • contribs) 13:32, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I've made it a little clearer what variable length means and dropped the misleading character numbers. Let me know if it makes sense and thanks for the feedback Pluke (discuss • contribs) 12:10, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
 * THats an improvement Tycho (discuss • contribs) 11:34, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

It may be better to take out the maximums as they do not to correspond to the variable width encodings. I am based in the UK and am currently studying the course. Tycho (discuss • contribs) 15:54, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

SQL Injection
The SQL Injection page A-level Computing‎/AQA‎/Problem Solving, Programming, Operating Systems, Databases and Networking‎/Databases/Security gives an example on how to protect against SQL injection that does not protect against SQL injection. It uses the mysql_real_escape_string function (Which is deprecated) to generated an escaped string but does not put it in quotes in the SQL so the escapes don't matter. mysql_real_escape_string will not escape any of the text in the string as it is all valid in a quoted string. The function is for things like ". I would make the edit but this page has a large number of issues including depreciated functions, an example that wont work as mysql will only execute one statement per query and the hashing section that implys md5 is a good function when sha2 is really now the minimum and doesn't mention salting. I would like to discuss the page before making large changes. Edits I am considering are moving the whole thing to to pseudo-code as there is all most no PHP on the site, talking about escaping and validation more generraly and updating the hashing function. --Tycho (discuss • contribs) 11:26, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Tycho, please jump straight in, this page is very uncared for at the moment and on my todo list for the summer. The material is largely out of date and a move to pseudo code would be welcomed.  Edit away and I'll help where I can. Pluke (discuss • contribs) 09:55, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Extreme/Boundary Testing
I was told by my teacher today regarding my Comp 4 that in the testing table the data should be referred to as Boundary Data and not Extreme Data. This also comes up in Comp 1. Do you agree this needs changing? --Drumncars1996 (discuss • contribs) 19:44, 12 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi Drumncars1996, the words are interchangeable, but if the exam uses Boundary, then change it to boundary and I'll approve your edit. Thanks for helping out! Pluke (discuss • contribs) 20:42, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Definitions List
I think it would be helpful to have a page collating all definitions for each of the units. I would gladly put some of the ones I have collected but I don't believe there is currently a page devoted to definitions. Do you agree that this would be useful? J Cobbles (discuss • contribs) 08:47, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a very good idea. Do you want to start a page or would you like me to set one up for you? Pluke (discuss •

contribs) 12:13, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
 * If you could set one up, that would be great, I'm not sure I have permission to set one up myself, I'm fairly new to wiki contributions. Thanks J Cobbles (discuss • contribs) 08:17, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Added, check them out:
 * UNIT1
 * UNIT2
 * UNIT3

merge
At the moment, the A-level Computing 2009 Wikibook and the A-level Computing Wikibook are mostly word-for-word identical.

Are there enough good reasons to keep them separate, or should they be merged? --DavidCary (discuss • contribs) 00:35, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

ːThe 2009 book is there as a snap shot of the text for people completing the old specification. The specification has significantly changed and as there were students doing the 2009 and the 2015 specifications at the same time it was felt that a 2009 book should be maintained separately. Now the 2009 specification has deprecated, there is an argument for combining both books, though others might want to have the old 2009 book layout and content to remain where it can be used. Pluke (discuss • contribs) 18:08, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Anti-Vandalism
Surely it makes sense to protect important pages respectively, such as predicted questions, rather than rely simply on trust to stop vandalism. Finnh54 (discuss • contribs) 09:27, 14 December 2020 (UTC)