Types of Software

Earlier we discussed application and system software as the two main categories of software; however, there are other software types that exist as well. The other types of software that I would like to discuss are Programming, Adware, Malware, Inventory Management, Utility and Data Back-up and Recovery software. Each form of software has its own set of instructions and specific functions that it must carry out. Programming software is a software development tool or application used to create, debug, maintain, or otherwise support other programs and applications. These tools were used in the early 1970s on UNIX systems and were known by the names of “grep, awk and make” that were meant to be combined randomly with certain pipes. These were simple tools back then, but have now grown to much more complex sets of instructions. Grep, awk and make are simple command line instructions used to perform operations. Grep is a utility used for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression. The AWK utility is a tool typically used as a data extraction and reporting. The Awk utility is used as a way to add computational features to a Unix pipeline. AWK uses a data-driven scripting language consisting of a set of actions to be taken against textual data for the purpose of producing formatted reports. Make is a utility that builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called make-files which specify how to obtain the target program. Another type of software that is used today is called malware. Malware refers to any malicious software that is a threat to computer security. Malware will surface in many different forms to include spyware, computer viruses, worms, trojan horses and scareware. Malware are malicious programs which replicate themselves and spread from one client to another client over the network or the Internet. Similar to malware, another harmful software that is prevalent is called Adware. Adware is software in which advertisements are played and downloaded to a computer. Adware extracts user information like websites that are frequently visited.