In a new paper, brilliantly timed to coincide with the start of the new series of Game of Thrones, we have an analysis of its main protagonists in terms of network theory 

The language that comes top in this year's IEEE Spectrum Ranking is Python, closely followed by C and Java. However if you think another language should be the most popular one, simply use its interactive tool to change the weightings!

SQL Server 2017 is now at Release Candidate 1, and is available for download with support for Windows and Linux.

An event offering seven concurrent workshops into today's leading technologies takes place in London in November. The number of places at each workshop is strictly limited so it is worth booking early. If you do so by Friday 28 July you can save £300.

We use compression algorithms extensively to save both storage and time. The most popular algorithms are based on LZ dictionary compression and are used in GIF, Deflate, Zip, PNG. It was even named an IEEE Milestone. But we know little about them. One long standing question is, can adding a single bit to a file dramatically change the compression achieved? Surely not!

The recent finding that developers who use spaces for indentation make more money that those who use tabs led to a few raised eyebrows and puzzled looks. Now reanalysis of the data finds further correlations.

The latest artistic AI is Google's Creatism, a deep learning photographer which it claims is capable of creating professional quality work. Looks like photographers aren't immune from the robot/AI takeover.

Yes, it's almost time for SIGGRAPH again and they seem to be getting better at advertising the conference. Well, it is a graphics conference and what is advertising but graphics, with the occasional word thrown in?

No time to keep up with all that is going on in the developer world? Let the I Programmer team do it for you. We scour the Internet for news and put the unmissable bits together in this handy digest, with the week's book reviews and articles. 

It's not unusual for experienced programmers to switch from one language to another. This could be to handle the requirements of different projects or just to try out new options. Whatever the reason there's quite a lot of migration, both temporary and permanent.

A new community build of Visual Studio Code has made the lightweight source code editor available for Chrome OS and Linux running on Raspberry Pi boards and Chromebooks.

This round up of resources from around the web will be of interest to JavaScript developers with different levels of expertise. 

There's an updated version of Babylon.js, Microsoft's open source JavaScript framework for building 3D games. The new release adds support for WebGL 2.

Deep Mind has been applying its deep reinforcement learning to the problem of walking - but not just any walking, this is difficult terrain. The neural network gets it wrong some of the time, but it is still impressive and its fails are fun to watch.

The latest version of .NET Core is available in preview with improvements to the platform support and the ability to reference .NET Framework libraries from .NET Standard libraries.

In June 2014 the United States Supreme Court ruled that implementing an abstract idea on a computer was insufficient grounds for making it eligible to be patented. Now lobbyists are trying to overturn the so-called Alice opinion, which is supported and defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.