First things first, the high-order byte of the number is going to be 1 -- not 256. It will become 256 in the resulting number because you are shifting it 8 bits (multiplying by 256). The bytes will be 1 and 24.
They determine the order those bytes appear in the array. According to
Wikipedia, big endian puts the most significant byte into the first byte (lowest memory address) of the array. Little endian puts the least significant byte first.
Because the hardware specifies which to use normally, and programs on different hardware have to communicate, "network order" was created, and it follows big endian. I believe
Java uses this by default in the JVM for simplicity.
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Also, since you're starting to deal with bytes and composition of larger numbers, I recommend learning
hexadecimal notation if you haven't already.
The number 280 converted to hexadecimal is 0x118. The handy thing with hexadecimal is that each two digits form a byte, so it's clear that 280 is broken up into two bytes: 0x01 and 0x18.
[ April 28, 2005: Message edited by: David Harkness ]
