Programming News and Views
Send your programming press releases, news items or comments to: NewsDesk@i-programmer.info
A Crash Course on Python By Google 13 Apr | Nikos Vaggalis  There's a free new Google course on Coursera for learning to program with Python.No previous exposure to programming required. |
IBM Releases COBOL For Linux On X86 13 Apr | Kay Ewbank  IBM has announced the release of IBM COBOL for Linux on X86, a phrase that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. The new release joins Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and COBOL for AIX in the IBM COBOL range. |
Code With Me For Pair Programming 12 Apr | Alex Armstrong  JetBrains has launched Code With Me, a plug-in service to empower developers across the world to work together and learn from each other. Code With Me is included in the new release of IntelliJ IDEA 2021.1 and is also compatible with other JetBrains IDEs. |
Google Supports Rust For Android OS Development 12 Apr | Kay Ewbank  Google has announced that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is adding support for Rust as a development language for the Android operating system. The support is being added to help avoid memory safety bugs in the code. |
A Robot Finally Learns To Walk 11 Apr | Lucy Black  The emphasis here is on "learns". Robots have been strutting their stuff for a while, with decreasing amounts of humour as they slowly manage not to fall over. What is new is that Cassie has taught itself to walk from scratch via reinforcement learning - no teacher needed. |
April Week 1 10 Apr | Editor  Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. This week we also have a new addition to Programmer's Bookshelf, where we include the top picks of books by our reviewers. |
Top 10 Projects From Arduino Community Day 09 Apr | Lucy Black  If you want inspiration for what you can do with an Arduino, take a look at the ten projects chosen as the winners of the Arduino Day Challenge. |
Microsoft Jumps on the OpenJDK Bandwagon 09 Apr | Nikos Vaggalis  Microsoft is releasing its own build of Java's OpenJDK, joining the likes of Azul, RedHat and Amazon. Why would Microsoft engage in that when there's so many choices already? |
$200K Call For Code 2021 Underway 08 Apr | Sue Gee  Climate change is the focus of this year's Code For Code a contest for developers from IBM, the David Clarke Cause,United Nations Human Rights, and the Linux Foundation. Build and deploy an open source solution for the chance to win the $200K Grand Prize. |
Zoom Releases Video SDK 08 Apr | Kay Ewbank  Zoom has released a video SDK that developers can use to create video-based applications and desktop experiences with native user interfaces. The Zoom video conferencing app has become more widely known and used during the coronavirus pandemic. |
Fortran Re-enters TIOBE Index Top 20 While Objective-C Leaves 07 Apr | Mike James  The two languages that are making headline news in the TIOBE Index for April 2021 are Objective-C which has left the top 20 and Fortran which is back there after more than 10 years. |
Firefox Close To Offering Local Translation 07 Apr | Sue Gee  Project Bergamot is an initiative to provide client-side machine spoken language translation in Firefox. Under development since 2019 this work-in-progress it is now available in Firefox Nightly. Currently, it is possible to translate Spanish and Estonian to English and vice versa, and English to German. |
Apache Isis 2 M5 Adds Spring Boot Integration 06 Apr | Alex Denham  There's a new milestone release of Apache Isis, the framework for developing UIs for domain-driven apps in Java. It provides JPA persistence support as an alternative to JDO and includes support for Spring Data. |
JetBrains Releases Projector For Swing 06 Apr | Kay Ewbank  JetBrains has released the initial version of Projector, an open source tool and framework for running JetBrains IDEs and Swing apps remotely over your network. |
Oracle V Google Android Case Settled 05 Apr | Mike James  At long last the 10 year case between Oracle and Google over the copyright or otherwise of the APIs used in Android is settled, the SCOTUS verdict is in. |
Brendan Eich Talks About JavaScript & More 05 Apr | Sue Gee  In a recent Lex Fridman podcast, Brendan Eich, the creator 25 years ago of JavaScript and currently of the Brave browser, provided his views on early programming languages, outlined how JavaScript came to be, problems faced by Firefox and explains how his new browser takes a different approach. |
Festo's BionicSwifts Fly Like Real Birds 04 Apr | Lucy Black  A new video from Festo shows its flock of five BionicSwifts moving gracefully in a coordinated and autonomous manner. Thanks to the way their wings are modelled on the plumage of real birds, these BionicSwifts have an even more convincing flight profile than previously. |
March Week 4 03 Apr | Editor Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. This week's first featured article comes from Harry Fairhead's recently published Raspberry Pi IoT in C Using Linux Drivers. The second is a history article about the computer designed by Alan Turing. |
Other Articles
|
Book Review
Embedded Vision: An Introduction (Mercury Learning) Tuesday 13 Apr Author: S. R. Vijayalakshmi and S. Muruganand |
Featured Articles
JavaScript Jems - The Proxy Mike James  The proxy is a mysterious object that lurks behind other objects - the question is why? This is an extract from my newly published book, JavaScript Jems: The Amazing Parts. |
Thomas J Watson Sr, Father of IBM Historian  The name of IBM occurs time and time again in any look back over the important events of computing. It is almost as if the company was a single creative force pushing the development of computing. Thomas J Watson Senior was the first of its guiding lights and is gnerally considered to be the Father of IBM. |
Programming Book Choices For Fun Kay Ewbank  There are lots of books on the 'mainstream' programming languages such as C++, JavaScript, Python, but what should you buy if you're wanting to encourage someone with the fun of programming, to either a child or a non-techie? |
The Heart Of A Compiler Mike James  Compilers are an essential part of using a computer - but there was a time when they simply didn't exist. First we had to realize that we needed such a thing and then we had to figure out how to build it. |
Pi IoT In C Using Linux Drivers - GPIO Character Driver Harry Fairhead  Linux drivers make working with devices so easy - assuming you know how. The most basic of all hardware is the GPIO and the sysfs way of working is now obsolete. Find out what the new way of doing things is all about. |
Unhandled Exception!
|
Book Watch
Follow Book Watch on Twitter
Book Watch is I Programmer's listing of new books and is compiled using publishers' publicity material. It is not to be read as a review where we provide an independent assessment. Some but by no means all of the books in Book Watch are eventually reviewed.
Python Natural Language Processing Cookbook (Packt) Monday 12 Apr This book will take you through a range of techniques for text processing, from basics such as parsing the parts of speech to complex topics such as topic modeling, text classification, and visualization. Zhenya Antić shows how to solve real-world NLP problems, such as dependency parsing, information extraction, topic modeling, and text data visualization. <ASIN:1838987312> |
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (Voracious) Friday 09 Apr “You look like a thing and I love you” is one of the best pickup lines ever…according to an artificial intelligence system trained by Janelle Shane, creator of the blog AI Weirdness. In her book subtitled "How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place", Shane creates silly AIs that learn how to name colors of paint, create the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans. <ASIN:0316525227> |
GraphQL in Action (Manning) Wednesday 07 Apr Practical and example-driven, this book gives the tools to get comfortable with the GraphQL language, build and optimize a data API service, and use it in a front-end client application. Samer Buna shows how to create a complete GraphQL server, and easy ways to incorporate GraphQL into an existing codebase to offer simple, efficient, and scalable data APIs. <ASIN:161729568X> |
Genius Makers (Dutton) Monday 05 Apr Subtitled "The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World", this book looks at the way artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing. New York Times Silicon Valley journalist, Cade Metz, has based this book on hundreds of interviews at those companies. He presents the fierce conflict AI engenders between national interests, shareholder value, the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the very human concerns about privacy, security, bias, and prejudice. <ASIN:1847942148> |
Micro:bit IoT In C, Second Edition (I/O Press) Friday 02 Apr The BBC micro:bit is capable of taking on a variety of roles including that of a powerful IoT device. In order to gain full access to its features and to external devices, however, you need to use C which delivers the speed which is crucial when you are writing programs to communicate with the outside world. The updated, expanded, 2nd Edition covers the new V2 version of the micro:bit and uses the VS Code for offline development. Writing for the electronics enthusiast with a programming background, Harry Fairhead presents details of sensors and circuits with several complete programs and provides downloadable templates for both V1 and V2 of the micro:bit to help you get started. <ASIN:1871962676> |
More Book Watch
|
Previous Book Watch.
Follow Book Watch on Twitter.
Publishers send your book news to:
bookwatch@i-programmer.info