Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. This week's first featured article comes from Fundamental C: Getting Closer to the Machine and looks at Expressions. The second is "The Fundamentals of Pointers" in which Mike James demystifies a sophisticated abstraction that can be confusing. 

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 May 19 - 25, 2022

Featured Articles  

Fundamental C - Expressions Harry Fairhead This extract, from my book on programming C in an IoT context explains the fundamental importance of the expression. From simple to sophisticated you have to master it. + FULL STORY

The Fundamentals of Pointers Mike James Despite the fact that pointers have been long regarded as "dangerous" they are still deeply embedded in the way we do things. Much of the difficulty in using them stems from not understanding where they originate from. Pointers are a sophisticated abstraction that wrap some fundamentals of assembly language.  + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

 

Microsoft Introduces Dev Box and Azure Deployment Environments 25 May | Sue Gee Microsoft Dev Box is a new Azure cloud service for hybrid development teams that provides developers with secure, ready-to-code developer workstations. A new portal enables Dev Boxes to be preconfigured for specific projects and tasks so that individual developers can get to straight to work without the overhead of workstation configuration. + FULL STORY

GOV.UK Drops jQuery 25 May | Ian Elliot jQuery used to be essential - now it's optional, or is it? The devs at GOV.UK have made a big fuss about finally getting rid of the evil code. But is dropping 32k of download worth it when you take everything into account? + FULL STORY

FairEmail Developer Pulls Out Of Play Store 24 May | Kay Ewbank Is being a developer of Android apps a good idea? Not according to a recent case reported on XDA Developers, where the developer of a popular open source email client has decided enough is enough, and is ceasing development and removing all his applications from Google Play. + FULL STORY

Apache OpenJPA - Life Beyond Hibernate? 24 May | Nikos Vaggalis Apache OpenJPA is the Java persistence project of the Apache Software Foundation. After quite some time flying under the radar, there's a new release. Let's look into it. + FULL STORY

Turing-ISR: AI-Powered Image Enhancements 23 May | Sue Gee Using the power of Deep Learning, the Microsoft Turing team has built a model to improve the quality of images and is incorporating its new technology dubbed Turing Image Super Resolution in Bing Maps and the Edge browser. + FULL STORY

PostgreSQL 15 Beta Released 23 May | Kay Ewbank The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has made the first beta release of PostgreSQL 15 available for download. Improvements in the new version include support for Merge and more advanced support for JSON. + FULL STORY

What's New With Spot 22 May | Harry Fairhead From nuclear environments to construction sites to manufacturing facilities, Boston Robotic's Spot quadruped robot is proving that agile mobile robots can have a useful role in a wide range of applications. Spot has recently had hardware upgrades, including a new tablet, and two new additions to its range of payloads. + FULL STORY

Google Releases ARCore Geospatial API 20 May | Kay Ewbank Google has launched the ARCore Geospatial API in ARCore SDKs for Android and iOS across all compatible ARCore-enabled devices. ARCore is Google's AR developer platform that provides developer tools for creating augmented reality applications that blend the digital and physical worlds. + FULL STORY

Grace Hopper Award Recognizes Contribution To Secure Computation 20 May | Sue Gee Raluca Ada Popa, an associate professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for the design of secure distributed systems. These systems protect confidentiality against attackers with full access to servers while maintaining full functionality. + FULL STORY

Kafka Adds KRaft-Based Authorizer 19 May | Kay Ewbank Apache Kafka, the distributed streaming platform that can be used for building real-time streaming data pipelines between systems or applications, has been updated with improvements including a KRaft-based authorizer and a proposal for marking KRaft mode as production ready in Apache Kafka 3.3. + FULL STORY

Striim Launched On Google Cloud 19 May | Kay Ewbank A new service that offers Google Cloud customers real-time streaming data integration and analytics has been launched by Striim. Striim Cloud on Google Cloud is claimed to be the fastest way for customers to deliver real-time data and insights to power business intelligence and decision-making. + 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 

• The Road to Azure Cost Governance (Packt)
  Rating: 4.5 out of 5   
  Reviewer: Ian Stirk

Ian Stirk concludes his review with:

This book aims to help you reduce your Azure costs, and undoubtedly succeeds. The topic is important to both bill payers and the planet. 

Many options are provided for reducing your Azure bill, focusing on right-sizing, cleanup, and reservations. The book is generally easy to read, with useful discussions, diagrams, example workflows, and links for further information. Some of the initial chapters, might feel a bit dry to a technologist, but stick with it, they provide useful background for the core middle chapters.

Added to Book Watch

• C# Programming, 3rd Ed (In Easy Steps)
• C++20 for Programmers 3rd Ed (Pearson)

• Machines Like Us (MIT Press)

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.