February Week 1
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 13 February 2021

Our weekly digest lists the week's featured articles and book review together with the new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and links to all the news items written each day by programmers, for programmers. It's a good way to catch up on what you might have missed.

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IP2

February 4 - 10, 2021    

Featured Articles    

Programmer's Python - Class & Type
Mike James
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Type and Python is a difficult topic from a philosophical point of view. Python isn’t strongly typed and yet the predominate programming paradigm is class-based, strongly-typed. Before we can understand Python's approach we need to know what type is and why it relates to class. 


William Shockley and Solid State Electronics
Historian
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Computers need suitable components to be developed before they can be built. It was the invention of the transistor that led to California's Silicon Valley became a hotbed of electronics innovation and William Shockley was the physicist who pioneered this breakthrough. 

 

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Programming News and Views  

Python Adopts Pattern Matching - Kitchen Sink Next
10 Feb | Mike James
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Python is a remarkable language, but its latest addition is making some programmers thing that maybe it has lost its way - although it really does depend on what you think that way is. Pattern matching is a functional programming construct and Python is only slightly functional.


The Importance of Open Source Contributions
10 Feb | Sue Gee
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Preparing for a scenario in which most companies will adopt an open hybrid cloud approach, developers should focus in developing their open source skills. Two thirds of developers believe that contributions to open source projects impress potential employers and often result in better job opportunities.


Build Your Own Computer Vision Device With OpenCV and SuperAnnotate
09 Feb | Alex Denham
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SuperAnnotate and OpenCV are partnering to offer users of the OpenCV AI Kit (OAK) access to SuperAnnotate's NoCode platform with the aim of building a smart camera with AI, trained on their own examples.


Google Updates Apigee API Manager
09 Feb | Kay Ewbank
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Google has updated Apigee, its management platform. Apigee X brings together Google’s expertise in AI, security, and networking, to help companies better manage their APIs.



Kaggle Survey Of Data Scientists
08 Feb | Janet Swift
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Kaggle's survey of data scientists reveals that the vast majority of data scientists are under 35 years of age, two-thirds have a graduate degree, and most have less than 10 years coding experience. It also finds that Scikit-learn is the most popular machine learning framework and JupyterLabs the preferred IDE.


Apache Arrow Improves C++ Support
08 Feb | Kay Ewbank
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Apache Arrow is now at version 3.0. The updated release improves support for the Arrow columnar format specification, has overhauled authentication in C++, Java and Python, and has a number of other improvements to C++ support. New in this release is support for Julia.


Too Good To Miss: Salto The Bouncing Robot
07 Feb | Harry Fairhead
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Some of our news items deserve a second chance. Here's one from June that is simply worth seeing. Salto is a tiny bouncing robot that proves that there is more than one way to build a robot. You can't help but think of an enthusiastic cartoon character as you watch Salto bounce along.


Intel Embree Wins Academy Award
05 Feb | Kay Ewbank
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded a Scientific and Technical Achievement award to Intel's Embree ray tracing library, in recognition of its role as a contributing innovation in the moviemaking process.


Perceptions of Alexa
05 Feb | Janet Swift
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In the space of seven years Amazon's conversational agent Alexa has come to have an almost ubiquitous presence. It is now the subject of a growing body of research looking into its impact on children who now grow up surrounded by conversational agents.


Npm 7 CLI Now Generally Available
04 Feb | Alex Denham
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Version 7 of npm CLI is now generally available and is now the official default version of the JavaScript package manager. The command line toolkit adds support for workspaces.


ScaleOut Improves Dev Support For Streaming Analytics
04 Feb | Kay Ewbank
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ScaleOut Software has improved the support for developing streaming analytics applications to run on its ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service.

 

Books of the Week

If you want to purchase, or to know more about, any of the titles listed below from Amazon, click on the book jackets at the top of the right sidebar. If you do make Amazon purchases after this, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a source of revenue that enables us to continue posting.

Full Review 

Reviewer: Ian Stirk  Rating: 5 out of 5
Verdict: This book is ideal for SQL Server DBA veterans who want to make the transition to the SQL Server Azure environment. Overall, this is the best book I’ve read on using SQL Server with Azure.

Added to Book Watch    

More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive

From the I Programmer Library

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    Last Updated ( Saturday, 13 February 2021 )