An Intro to Binary

Submitted by one of our members, k0ncept

An Introduction to Binary

As someone just starting there adventures in the networking world binary can be both scary and confusing. I am going to attempt to make learning binary as pain free as possible and break it down to it's simplest form.

Lets start off with some basics. First off binary is a string of 0's and 1's. The 1's being the on switch, and the 0's being the off switch. When a computer sees the 0's and 1's it only counts the 1's. Take for example what we've grown up learning with numbers. In our base 10 system we have the 1's place, the 10's place, the 100's place, etc. So basically our base 10 is just anything to the 10th power.

0^10 = 1's place; 1^10 = 10's place; 2^10 = 100's place; etc.

So Binary is just everything to the 2nd power. It makes it a bit more confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, it makes total sense.

0^2 = 1; 1^2 = 2; 2^2 = 4; 3^2 = 8; etc.

Basically binary just doubles as you go, and is split into 8 bits (each zero and each one is a bit). So typically you'd see something like this 1001 1011 0101 0101. Every 8 bits if turned on equals 256. Counting in multiples of 2's we'd look at it like this 128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1 equaling 8 seperate bits. This is important to remember later on in networking for subnetting and how IP addresses work.

So lets count to 9 in binary. Remeber the computer only counts the 1's. So 1001 would equal 9. We know this because 0^2 = 1; and 3^2 = 8 and we just add those together. When ever I have to use binary I always start out writing all 8 bits out to make things easier to add up later on. Especially when the number gets rather large.