Clearly you and the authors have very different ideas about what data is. But then it just feels like a pointless complaint like complaining about an article fo

Clearly you and the authors have very different ideas about what data is. But then it just feels like a pointless complaint like complaining about an article for using American/commonwealth/British spelling. Presumably your actual complaint is about the structure and pedagogical merits of the book, but then why not write that instead of moaning about definitions? For what it’s worth, I disagree with you and I think there are good CS books that don’t really talk about bits or technical details of computers (SICP is a famous example). I also think that C style computer-fiddling doesn’t really help to build intuitions for modern computers as the models implied by C don’t really map to compiler output or to performance on real computers—if you want to know about that, CS-101 is probably the wrong place to go.