There is a close but complicated relationship between bytes and strings. Find out how it all works in this extract from my new book Programmer's Python: Everything is Data .

The original PC could just about manage to make a rasping sort of “beep”, but today’s machines are expected to make any noise you care to think of and sound like a hi-fi or even better. We’ve come a long way since the tiny internal loudspeaker used to make the beeps – it's still in there, but rarely used.

The results of the 2022 State of JavaScript Survey have been released. What do they tell us about the ever-expanding JavaScript ecosystem and the developers who use it?

All of the amazing things that have been achieved with AI over the past few years are down to the neural network and the way that it is trained using backpropagation. Now long time AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton has a new way of doing the job and it is interesting.

Microsoft has updated the Graph Developer Proxy, which it says can be used to build resilient and performant apps. The updated version adds support for simulating errors on Microsoft Graph and other APIs, and contextual guidance to help you improve the performance of your apps.

The Python Software Foundation has introduced a sliding scale for membership fees in order to further its goal of diversity. You can now become a member for as little as $25 per year.

The accolade "Programming Language of the Year" attracts new attention to the winner. This year it is C++ that has taken the honor, having been the language that has seen the greatest year-on-year increase in its popularity.

The talks presented at the 21st annual EuroPython conference are now available for free on YouTube. Topics ranged from Code and Tech to Social and Career advice.

Nine teams have been selected for the fifth iteration of the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge. Will one of them succeed this year in claiming the $1 Million that is on offer for the first Social Bot capable of holding an engaging and coherent conversation lasting 20 minutes?

Sim Wong Hoo, CEO of Creative Technology, has died at the age of 67. He brought us the Sound Blaster card, the product that enabled the PC to do much more than simply beep.

Programmers love learning. In particular they have embraced online learning with many developers revealing in surveys that they enrol in multiple courses - sometimes concurrently! So here's news of an offer from Future Learn you might find interesting.

Bias and fairness have become important issues as AI and machine learning continue to take over decisions in all walks of life. Amazon's Machine Learning University has added a new course addressing these issues with practical application that is publicly accessible online for free.

Wing Python 9 has been released with support for support for Python 3.11 and optimizations to the debugger among the improvements.

Author: Avinash Valiramani
Publisher: ‎ Microsoft Press
Pages: 320
ISBN: 978-0137564446
Audience: Azure users
Rating: 4.5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

This book is a guide to Azure compute services for IT professionals who need to work out the best way to implement Azure, then deploy and operate it. 

This book reveals what you can do with the Pico's GPIO lines together with widely used sensors, servos and motors and ADCs. After covering the GPIO, outputs and inputs, events and interrupts, Harry Fairhead and Mike James give you hands-on experience of PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), the SPI bus, the I2C bus and the 1-Wire bus. This second edition has been expanded to cover wi-fi connectivity provided by the Pico W.

This book is a complete yet concise guide that reflects the major enhancements of Scala 3, from improved syntax and revamped type system to powerful contextual abstractions.Cay Horstmann, author of Core Java, covers what working developers need to know, focusing on hands-on solutions, not academic theory.

This book takes a step-by-step approach to problem solving and skill development using Go. Sufyan bin Uzayr starts with a quick run-through of the basic concepts, before moving on to the more advanced, hands-on core concepts, with a focus on real-world problems. The book places special emphasis on writing clean and optimized code, with additional chapters focused on coding methodology.