Introduction to binary

Base 10, decimal, using numbers 0 to 9. Base 16, hexadecimal, using 0 to 9 along with A to F. Base 26, the alphabet. And finally, base 2, binary.

Binary is often thought of as a very difficult, complex series of 1's and 0's with a very specific meaning after a few thousand numbers. Binary is a 2-digit representation of numbers. The most commonly used systems of counting in programming are binary, hexadecimal and our lovely general numeric system, decimal. You won't have to actually be able to read and write binary to write code - if you tell the computer, X = 1 + 5, it will do it for you. You don't need to write X = 0001 + 0101. But that doesn't mean you won't need to know binary.

With the correct usage, knowledge of binary can help you with very fast file I/O (input and output) and with making very tiny packets. Packet compression algorithms in an online game is often a very unsatisfying practice with negative results, but with binary, we can write specific bit-wise compressions on a per-packet basis. But first, we must understand how binary works!