35000 ft. Overview of Software Technologies

Question

Friends!

Can someone point me to an explanation (subjective/ map) which untangles the complex mesh of technologies which kinda overwhelms a newbie who wants to get an understanding of what fits where in terms of software.

Thanks

Another way of asking the same question: "Can someone talk about the technology ecospace"? What are the set of technologies which are competitors towards solving the same problems: e.g. Oracle/ SQL/ MySQL/ DB2 are Databases ... something similar to that kind of map.

Answer 1

A good start would be learning about Computer Organization and Architecture. This will give a more solid understanding of where everything comes from and how it has evolved.

The above link (book) covers the following:

• An introduction into the subject
• Computer Evolution and Performance
• Computer Function and Interconnection
• Internal and External Memory
• Input/Output
• Operating Systems
• Computer Arithmetic
• Instruction Sets
• Instruction Level Parallelism and Superscalar Processors
• IA-64
• Parallel Processing

That's a decent set of principles to learn. Once you have the principles, understanding will come with a lot more ease.

Answer 2

This wikipeadia article looks like a good place to start Outline of computer engineering.