Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week includes an extract from Raspberry Pi IoT in C on using the DS18B20 temperature sensor and a chapter from Financial Functions with a Spreadsheet that explores what makes a good investment.

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 May 12 - 18, 2022

Featured Articles  

Raspberry Pi IoT In C - The DS18B20 Temperature Sensor Harry Fairhead The DS18B20 is the most used of the 1-wire devices. Find out how to use it. This is an extract from the Raspberry Pi IoT in C, Second Edition. + FULL STORY

Investment Analysis Janet Swift How is it possible to evaluate investments that generate irregular cashflows? We explore how NPV can be used to make investment decisions. This chapter of Financial Functions with a Spreadsheet explores what makes a good investment. + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

Gato And Artificial General Intelligence 18 May | Mike James DeepMind has set the cat among the pigeons - again. Gato is a transformer model trained on a range of different subject areas that claims to be a "multi-modal" solution, i.e. it's an AI that can do more than one thing well. This isn't in dispute, but the idea that this is the solution to Artificial General Intelligence is... + FULL STORY

Scratch At 15 - Worth Knowing About 18 May | Sue Gee This week is Scratch Week, a global, virtual celebration of the block programming language for kids from MIT that this year celebrates its 15th anniversary. + FULL STORY

Kalix-NoOps High-performance Microservices and APIs 17 May | Nikos Vaggalis What Kalix Platform-as-a-Service promises is massive - a way to write cloud applications based on Kubernetes under a unified API abstracting the lower layers away. + FULL STORY

Meta Donates Jest To OpenJS Foundation 17 May | Kay Ewbank Meta Open Source is transferring Jest, its open source JavaScript testing framework, to the OpenJS Foundation. Jest is the most used testing framework measured by weekly downloads (17 million a week) and by GitHub stars -  over 38,000. + FULL STORY

Dash Dash - Making Linux Documentation More Approachable 16 May | Nikos Vaggalis Dash Dash is a new website that aims to prettify the ugly that is the Man Pages. What once felt like a maze of weird symbols and hyper intense colors, now are visually subdued and easier to understand. + FULL STORY

Docker Adds Extensions 16 May | Kay Ewbank The Docker team has announced two major improvements at DockerCon; Docker Extensions and Docker Desktop for Linux. + FULL STORY

Deep Blue Became World Chess Champion 25 Years Ago 15 May | Alex Armstrong Today is the 25th Anniversary of IBM's chess playing supercomputer Deep Blue beating the reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov at his own game, marking a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence. Or was it just a bug? + FULL STORY

Lights, Camera, Sound - AI Improvements to Google Meet 13 May | Sue Gee Updates and new features in Google Meet which will bring welcome improvements to virtual meetings were announced this week at Google I/O. + FULL STORY

Flutter 3 Is Stable For MacOS And Linux 13 May | Kay Ewbank Flutter 3 has been released and is now stable for macOS and Linux, in addition to Windows. The developers say the new release also offers significant performance improvements as well as mobile and web updates. + FULL STORY

Google Announces AlloyDB To Free Users From Legacy Databases 12 May | Kay Ewbank Google has announced a preview of AlloyDB for PostgreSQL at Google I/O. The announcement describes the fully-managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database service as providing a powerful option for modernizing the most demanding enterprise database workloads. + FULL STORY

Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ 12 May | Nikos Vaggalis The Azure Toolkit is a plugin for IntelliJ that provides templates and functionality with which you easily create, develop, test, and deploy Azure applications. The newest version 3.64.0 was recently released.  + FULL STORY

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 small source of revenue that enables us to continue posting.

Full Review 

• Learn Quantum Computing with Python and Q# (Manning)
  Rating: 4.5 out of 5   
  Reviewer: Mike James

Mike James concludes his review of a book that attempts to convey the ideas of quantum computing to the average programmer with minimal math with:

My final verdict is that this is about as good a non-math-oriented introduction to quantum computing gets. Be warned, there are equations and mathematics that keep peeking through at every turn. You cannot avoid it, but you don't need much math to cope. What I would conclude, however, is that it is much easier to learn the math first and then learn the QM that is needed for quantum computing. In my opinion the math makes it easier. 

Added to Book Watch

• PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook (Packt)
• Discovering Modern C++, 2nd Ed (Addison-Wesley)
• Coding with Scratch (In Easy Steps)

More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive.

From the I Programmer Library

Published this month:

• Programmer's Python: Everything is Data by Mike James

This is the second of our Something Completely Different titles that look at what makes Python special and sets it apart from other programming languages. These books aren’t for the complete beginner and some familiarity with both object-oriented programming and Python is assumed. The first in the series, Programmer’s Python: Everything is an Object, about to be available in its second edition, reveals how Python has a unique and unifying approach with regards to class and objects. Following the same philosophy the language also treats data in a distinctly Pythonic way. What we have in Python are data objects that are very usable and very extensible. From the unlimited precision integers, referred to as bignums, through the choice of a list to play the role of the array, to the availability of the dictionary as a built-in data type, Python behaves differently to other languages and this book is what you need to help you make the most of these special features. There are also complete chapters on Boolean logic, dates and times, regular expressions and bit manipulation.

Recently published:

• The Trick Of The Mind: Programming and Computational Thought by Mike James 

Programmers think differently from non-programmers, they see and solve problems in a way that the rest of the world doesn't. In this book Mike James takes programming concepts and explains what the skill involves and how a programmer goes about it. In each case, Mike looks at how we convert a dynamic process into a static text that can be understood by other programmers and put into action by a computer. If you're a programmer, his intent is to give you a clearer understanding of what you do so you value it even more.