Featured Articles

PHP Variables and Expressions for Complete Beginners
Ian Elliot

Variables and expressions are the core of programming in general and no less so in PHP. If you have never encountered the ideas here is a gentle introduction.

A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was convened on  December 10, 2019 to confront the  ongoing conflict between government and law enforcement agencies and the tech industry regarding encryption. Experts from Apple and Facebook gave testimony but it was clear from the outset that the verdict had  been reached before the hearing even began: encryption is an evil that must be sacrificed in the interests of law enforcement.

News

The Software Industry Rallies Behind Google To Save Programming
15 Jan | Mike James

The Oracle v Google lawsuit has been going on for more than ten years. Now the Supreme Court is close to delivering a final verdict and the software industry finally seems to have woken up to the dangers of it finding in favor of Oracle.

The start of the year, when it is traditional to come up with self-improving resolutions, is a good time to contemplate new job opportunities. So what are employers looking for in 2020? Here we have two lists of the most sought skills.

MIT researchers have trained a neural network to tell you how fast any code that you present it with will run. Sounds fun but why do we need it?

A collaboration between Google and The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has added many new datasets to those available on Google Cloud. The datasets have been added as part of the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program and NOAA's Big Data Project. 

Every year, about this time, TIOBE announces the language of the year and this year it isn't something new and exciting, it's an old timer - C. What next? Fortran for 2021?

ESLint is an open source JavaScript linting utility. Newly updated the latest version adds a new Suggestions API, alongside an IgnorePatterns property.

Neural networks, in particular GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) have found yet another application. This time it's underwater vision for the exploration of seabed resources, fishing and underwater archaeology.

The UK's Royal Mail has designed a set of postage stamps  celebrating iconic video games from the 1980s and 90s which originated in the UK.

Microsoft has officially joined the OpenJDK project and formally signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement. OpenJDK is the free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition.

Google has the announced the 2020 edition of the annual Google Play Indie Games Festival. This year Google will host three competitions for developers from several European countries, Japan, and South Korea.

Curl, an open source project that is widely used to transfer data, has been given a donation of $10K by indeed.com, the #1 job site. The donation was made through Open Collective and is the largest single donation the project has ever received.

An improved version of TigerGraph Cloud, the parallel graph database has been launched as a graph database-as-a-service platform.

Books of the Week

Full Review

Expert Performance Indexing in SQL Server 2019(Apress) 

Reviewer: Ian Stirk,  Rating: 4.5 (out of 5)

Added to Book Watch

Mastering Professional Scrum (Addison-Wesley Professional)

Beginning Database Programming Using ASP.NET Core 3 (Apress)

SAM (Avid Reader Press)