Asia political

Some of the world’s first great civilizations sprang up in Asia from 3500 BC onwards. Their riches attracted trade and conquering armies. Over the centuries peoples such as the Mongols and the Turks built up and then lost vast empires. From the 1800’s much of Asia was colonized by European countries. These new rulers took away wealth, but did not help the colonies develop their industries. Great social changes have taken place in Asia during this century. Many colonies freed themselves from their European rulers, creating independent nation...

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Fourth Generation Computer Languages

When you use a third generation language to perform a task you need to provide a detail description of how this task should be carried out. For very narrow domains (specific areas) fourth generation programming languages have been developed, where you only needed to describe what is required. The most famous example of a fourth generation language is the Structured Query Language (SQL) which is used with databases. Using SQL you can retrieve data from a database in different formats for various conditions just by specifying the headings you need,...

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Third Generation Computer Languages

A program is a list of instructions that performs a particular task. Assembly programs were very long, this made it difficult to maintain programs written in Assembly. In the late 1950 Computer Scientists came up with high level computer languages which were closer to English and Mathematics. High Level languages are relatively easy for people to learn and to program computers. Fig 4.2, shows examples of four programs written in diffe rent high level programming languages which display the message “Hello World” on the computer screen. High...

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Introduction to Programming

Languages In Sri Lanka people use three languages Sinhala, Tamil and English. The purpose of a language is to allow people to communicate. If we want to communicate with a computer it would be ideal if you could use a language like English. Unfortunately computers at present are not intelligent enough to understand human languages. Because of this computer scientists have developed computer friendly languages. These computer languages could be learnt relatively easily by people. Using such a computer language you can communicate with a computer....

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Problems in Systems Development

It is evident by now, system development is a complex process. There are many areas where things can go wrong which may result in project failure. As per our initial discussion, the system development methodologies (such as SDLC) were proposed to provide some structure and formalism to system development process in order to ensure that valid systems are developed and to minimise the possibility of failure. Although, following a methodology does not guarantee success, it provides a mechanism to minimise failures and detect problems early in the...

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Systems Development Life Cycle

In Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) model, the development process is divided into a set of well-defined steps or phases as follows: Systems Investigation System Analysis and Requirements Definition Systems Design Software Development Testing Implementation Maintenance The SDLC is a development process that is best suited for projects where the requirements can be clearly defined. SDLC encourages top-down problem solving. That is, designers must first define the problem to be solved and then use an ordered set of steps to reach a solution....

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Information Systems Development

By now, we have gained an understanding of what information systems are and also seen their importance within an organisation. In this section, we discuss how information systems are developed. Developing information systems is a complex process (especially large-scale information systems). There have been many attempts in developing information systems that have failed to meet their objectives. Hence, information system development has been extensively studied and many approaches are proposed for information system development. We will study...

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