Featured Articles

The Insider's Guide to the Java Web Developer Nanodegree - 4
Nikos Vaggalis

More of our ongoing in-depth coverage of the new Udacity Nanodegree program that will enhance your career prospects as a Java web developer. At last we get to play in the big league with the Java Persistence API and Hibernate.

Don't dismiss the spreadsheet. It not only brought programming to the masses, but was an early entry into rapid application development, functional programming and an easy and natural approach to parallel programming, reactive programming and cellular automata.

Udacity and Microsoft have just launched a Nanodegree program that will equip you with the skills to build cloud-based applications on Microsoft Azure. It also serves as preparation for Microsoft’s AZ-204 Azure Developer Associate Expert certification exam.

GitHub has announced the general availability of its new command-line tool, GitHub CLI. The tool lets you issue pull requests and work with issues from the command line to give developers a more seamless way to work with GitHub repositories from the command line.

The fledgling Mozilla WebThings project, a laudable attempt to move towards an open and decentralized Internet of Things, is being booted out of its parental nest as Mozilla withdraws it support. Luckily it has been offered a safety net by Krellian.

There's a major new release of Vue.js, the JavaScript library. The developers say version 3 provides improved performance, smaller bundle sizes, better TypeScript integration, new APIs for tackling large scale use cases, and "a solid foundation for long-term future iterations of the framework".

The very first successful FORTRAN program ran on September 20, 1954. Invented at IBM by a group led by John Backus, FORTRAN, standing for "FORmula TRANslator" was to first language to crack the problem of converting mathematical expressions to code.

After is successful crowdfunding campaign in 2018 for its robotic kitten, Nybble, Petoi has now introduced Bittle, a palm-sized robot dog and has already  been pledged more than six times its $50,000 goal on Kickstarter. There's still time to pre-order the Biitle kit for $225, a discount on its subsequent price.

Microsoft has announced Project OneFuzz framework, an open source developer tool to find and fix bugs at scale. The automated, open-source tool will replace the Microsoft Security and Risk Detection tool.

The newly launched C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge is an international competition that invites participants to create new and innovative software solutions that provide data-driven insights to inform decision makers in the global fight against COVID-19.

Getting familiar with OpenID and OAuth is really difficult.There are dozens of specifications to go through, and to make things even worse the two protocols involve different terminology. To help out, Pragmatic Web Security offers a free and outstanding course on OAuth and OIDC 101.

Oracle has announced that Java 15 is now generally available. The announcement was made in the opening keynote of Oracle Developer Live, an online version of the usual CodeOne and OpenWorld conferences.

Added to Book Watch    

• Modern Fortran Explained 5th Ed (Oxford University Press)
• Modern C++ Programming Cookbook 2nd Ed (Packt)
• Elements of Game Design (MIT Press)

More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive

From the I Programmer Library

For IoT 

• Fundamental C: Getting Closer to the Machine by Harry Fairhead

Best seller this month

• The Programmer’s Guide To Theory by Mike James