ASCII
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that represents text in computers and other devices. It uses 7-bit binary numbers to encode 128 characters, including English letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control codes. ASCII was developed in the 1960s and remains foundational for text representation in computing, though it has largely been superseded by Unicode for broader character support.
Developers should learn ASCII to understand the basics of character encoding, which is essential for text processing, data transmission, and debugging encoding issues in software. It is particularly useful in low-level programming, legacy systems, and scenarios involving plain text files or network protocols where ASCII compatibility is required. Knowledge of ASCII helps in grasping more advanced encodings like UTF-8, which is backward-compatible with ASCII.