If you are looking for a programmer present this holiday season, there is one book, or set of books, that should be top of any list... Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

Leave it to us to sift through the news and find the items that are relevant or interesting to developers, data scientists and anybody interested in programming languages, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and much much more. This week we have a roundup of titles on Python from the I Programmer library and an extract from our book on C#.

The winners of the 2023 Call for Code competition have been announced, with prizes going to team AGNO, Phyto and team Synergy Squad, all of which used technologies like IBM watsonx and IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, to address agricultural issues ranging from contaminated soil and crop management to food waste.

Tomorrow marks the 117th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Considered "the first lady of software" she was the original figurehead chosen for Computer Science Education Week, which is timed to coincide with her birthday. To celebrate the date we have a cartoon comic that summarizes her story.

The Eclipse Foundation has launched a dataspace working group with the intention of 'fostering global innovation in trusted data sharing'.

JetBrains has announced that its AI-powered coding tool is now generally available for its IDEs. The tool was announced earlier in the year but until now has been on limited access.

VS Code is a "go-anywhere, work-with-anything" dev system. However, not all languages are created equal and build systems for C/C++ are particularly challenging. The latest VS Code does something to make it easier.

Here are two introductions to Generative AI  - one from DeepLearning.AI presented by Andrew Ng, the other from Google Cloud Training. Both are on the Coursera platform and both are short, six hours and less than one hour respectively. 

Microsoft is making Terminal Chat, an AI feature for Windows Terminal that was announced at Microsoft's Build 2023 conference, open source.

An updated version of Notepad++ is available, on its 20th anniversary. The text editor first saw light in November 2003 when it was released on SourceForge.

Amazon has announced Q, a generative artificial intelligence powered assistant that can be tailored to the data in a specific organization.

CRaC is a novel technique that makes the JVM faster to start.
Liberica's JDK build has just added support for it. Here are the details.

Boston Dynamics' quadruped robot Spot has been given the ability to hear questions and respond to them, thanks to integration with Chat GPT and other AI models. See Spot in action as a tour guide and as a proof of concept for the robotics applications of foundational models. 

Get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer with our weekly digest. It summarizes the week's news together with the week's book review and new titles selected for Book Watch Archive. This week we have a history article on Codebreaking and Colossus and an extract from Master Raspberry Pi Pico in C: WiFi about the UDP protocol.

December 1st is the day on which, each year, Eric Wastl opens a very special advent calendar. You don't get rewarded with chocolates in the Advent of Code - instead it's stars for solving coding puzzles.

Microsoft has made the classic Windows XP wallpaper the design for its shot at this year's ugly sweater options. If, like me, you're wondering how you managed to successfully avoid this as a concept, read on.

GameMaker, for creating 2D platform games and now part of the Opera family, has made a change to its prices and terms and it is good news. GameMaker is now free for non-commercial purposes on all non-console platforms.

Microsoft has launched SharePoint Embedded, a new API-only cloud-based file and document management system that can be used by app developers to make use of the Microsoft 365 file and document storage platform for any app.