Featured Articles

Programmer's Guide To Theory - Where Do The Big Os Come From
Mike James

You may know about big O notation, but what does it tell you about the algorithm in question? This is what this extract from Chapter 15 of the recent book by Dr Mike James is all about.

Structured exception handling sounds like a really good idea until you start to look at it more closely - then it almost becomes worse than the problem it is trying to solve. We look at exception handling - the philosophy, the strategy and the way C# does the job.

News

Computer Graphics Pioneers Win 2019 Turing Award
18 Mar | David Conrad

Founding members of Pixar, Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, are the recipients of the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Considered to be the Nobel Prize of computing, this annual award, is worth $1 million and recognizes significant fundamental contributions - in this instance to computer graphics. 

When Windows 10 was launched in April 2015, Microsoft's Terry Myerson made an ambitious prediction - that the new operating system would be on 1 Billion Devices in two to three years. Now, almost 5 years later, that milestone has been reached. 

Microsoft is purchasing npm, the package manager for Node.js. The intention is for npm to be freely available and their will be continued, paid for, support customers who use npm Pro, Teams, and Enterprise to host private registries. 

The RAPIDS software libraries collection for machine learning and data analysis has been updated with improvements to performance and core libraries. 

Learn JavaScript fundamentals through fun and challenging quizzes! This interactive quiz provides a total hands-on learning experience. It currently has 72 questions on a variety of Javascript concepts and more are being added.

Microsoft has produced an updated roadmap for Visual Studio with details of what's planned up till June 2020. The team says it captures significant capabilities that they plan to add, but it’s not a comprehensive feature list.

DeepMind's acclaimed AlphaGo - The Movie, about how AI took on and defeated South Korean Go Master Lee Seedol, has proved a big hit with AI researchers and Go aficionados. It is now on YouTube making it more accessible than ever. 

So many Pi days, so many digits - and yet it is still mysterious and fascinating. I give you some deep thoughts on the irrational transcendental.

Visual Basic is arguably the language that made Windows accessible to the rest of us. In its latest announcement Microsoft puts a positive spin on the confirmation that it no longer has a future. 

There's an updated version of the Unicode Standard. Version 13.0 adds 554 characters, four new scripts, and 61 new emoji characters.

Udacity has added a new program, Data Streaming, to its School of Data Science. At advanced level this nanodegree is designed to teach you how to process data in real-time by building fluency in modern data engineering tools, such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Spark Streaming, and Kafka Streaming. 

Google has launched FuzzBench, an automated free service for evaluating fuzzers. Google says goal of FuzzBench is to make it painless to rigorously evaluate fuzzing research and make fuzzing research easier for the community to adopt. 

Books of the Week

Full Review

Microsoft SQL Server 2019: A Beginner's Guide, 7th Ed

Rating: 4.5 (out of 5) Ian Stirkconcludes his review with:

This ambitious book covers a lot of topics. Although the title may suggest it’s for beginners, it is probably more appropriate for database staff with at least 6 months experience. It should allow SQL Server devs and admins to update their knowledge to the latest version. Another useful audience would be devs and admins coming to SQL Server from other environments (e.g. Oracle). The book might also be appropriate for university students learning about database systems in general, and SQL Server in particular.

Added to Book Watch

• Practical Rust Projects (Apress)
• Pandas 1.x Cookbook, 2nd Ed (Packt)
• Using Asyncio in Python (O'Reilly)