There are fringe people who confuse the computer with vocational areas that typically involve the use of application software and which include the simple use of programs for the office, surfing the web or gaming. The computer instead sees text editor, browser, and video games as mere tools for work or leisure. What is interesting, in computing pure, is not knowing how to use the so-called application for how they present themselves, but rather to understand, for example, through the analysis of the source code, structure and possibly knowledgeable improve with the use of algorithms efficient under different criteria (memory usage, number of instructions, parallelism, ...).
In universities there are departments and Science courses. A computer should always have a genuine interest in the theoretical foundations of computer science; which then, by profession or passion, often face the developer of software is possible but, being able to leverage their problem solving skills in various areas, it is not obvious. In any case the computer, at least in its application part, is a discipline strongly oriented to problem solving.
The theoretical foundations of the discipline then descend directly from mathematics (discrete mathematics), to which the computer is closely related, and it is also for this reason that the study of computer science has recently gained attention in the multidisciplinary try to clarify or justify processes and complex systems of the real world, such as the ability of the human brain to generate thoughts from molecular interactions (studies belonging to bioinformatics).
In particular, the computer goes into several smaller fields: the study of formal languages and automata, which also covers the compilers; the study of the computational complexity, especially for minimizing the number of instructions to be executed for the resolution of a problem and the search for approximate algorithms for solving NP-hard; Cryptology, the science that studies the methods to make a message incomprehensible to anyone who is not in possession of a key to the message itself; the theory of codes, used for data compression or to increase the integrity of the data; operations research, to provide mathematical tools to support decision-making activities; computer graphics, divided in turn into bitmap graphics and vector graphics; quoting only certain subfields.
