June Week 2

If you want to keep up to date with what’s relevant to you as a developer, our weekly digest summarizes the articles and news written every day by programmers, for programmers. This week Harry Fairhead takes a look at multitasking and we have a series of books on R, the popular language for statistics, data analysis and data mining.
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June 9 – 15, 2022
Featured Articles
Really good R books Kay Ewbank ![]() R’s popularity as a language for statistics, data analysis, and data mining is growing year by year, and as you’d expect, there are some great books on the subject. The strengths of R make it one of the most commonly used programming languages in data mining. In this guide, we’ve highlighted the best of the R books we’ve reviewed on I Programmer. |
Multitasking Harry Fairhead ![]() We take multitasking for granted now, but it was a difficult technology to master – and it still is. We take a look at how it all developed and variations on the basic idea. |
Programming News and Views
Suspended for claiming AI is sentient Can a large language model be sentient? This is news that has made the rounds and just about everyone has comments to make about it. But who better to comment than a man accused of killing a sentient AI – me! |
Fast And Safe Rust Rust is one of the few innovative languages threatening to upend the old order, but is it really that good? A new research survey suggests that it really does seem to be both safer and faster, which is remarkable. |
JetBrains updates the Datalore BI platform JetBrains has updated Datalore Enterprise, its data science and BI platform, to add support for Docker-based installation. Docker support means Datalore can be set up quickly in AWS, GCP, Azure, or on an on-premises machine by running a single Docker command. |
200 years ago, Charles Babbage proposed his difference engine Two hundred years ago today, on June 14, 1822, Charles Babbage presented a one-page memo to the Royal Astronomical Society in London setting out his plans to build a difference engine that would use a clockwork mechanism to solve polynomial equations. |
Perl 5.36 Released – What’s New? Perl 5.36 was released recently and comes with many great features. It’s a prelude to Perl 7, but it could be more than that since the future of 7 is still uncertain. |
Apache HOP 2.0 released Apache Hop 2.0 released. The Hop Orchestration Platform is an open-source data integration platform where everything is treated as metadata, which means it can work with most data platforms. HOP 2.0 has been upgraded to Java 11 and added a number of transformation plugins. |
Videos from the Inaugural Computer History Lecture The first international research conference on the history of computing, dubbed Computing’s Woodstock, brought together a world elite of computing pioneers. It took place in June 1976 and today the Computer History Museum has restored 21 video recordings of its sessions and posted them on its YouTube channel. |
Bash-Oneliner and GameShell teach the Unix command line Two excellent resources, one for beginners and one for intermediate users, to learn the Unix shell, well, Linux. |
Apple improves developer support Apple announced a range of new tools and technologies at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), including making Xcode Cloud open to all members of the Apple Developer Program. |
GitHub abandons Atom GitHub announced the closure of the Atom editor in six months. Why is it doing this and what should its users do? |
CockroachDB adds hash sparse indexes Cockroach DB has been updated with what the developers say are a variety of management, performance, security and compatibility improvements. |
Books of the week
If you want to buy or learn more about any of the titles listed below on Amazon, click on book covers at the top of the right sidebar. If you shop on Amazon after that, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program, which is a small revenue stream that allows us to continue publishing.
Full Review
Verdict: It’s a great book as long as you’re not a complete beginner and you’re a scientist or similar and are particularly interested in C++ as a numerical or scientific programming language. If you are not part of this target audience, the extent to which you will like the book depends entirely on how far you are from the audience. I think the generalist C++ programmer could get a lot of enjoyment out of this book.
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This is the second of our something completely different titles that examine what makes Python special and sets it apart from other programming languages. These books are not intended for complete beginners and some familiarity with 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 when it comes to classes and objects. Following the same philosophy, the language also processes data in a distinctly Pythonic way. What we have in Python are very usable and very extensible data objects. From integers with unlimited precision, called bignums, to choosing a list to act as the array, to having the dictionary available as a built-in data type, Python behaves differently from other languages and this book is what you need to help you get the most out of these special features. There are also comprehensive chapters on Boolean logic, dates and times, regular expressions, and bit manipulation.

Programmers think differently from non-programmers, they see and solve problems in a way the rest of the world doesn’t. In this book, Mike James takes programming concepts and explains what the skill entails and how a programmer goes about it. In each case, Mike examines how we convert a dynamic process into static text that can be understood by other programmers and put into action by a computer. If you’re a programmer, its intention is to give you a better understanding of what you’re doing so that you enjoy it even more.
I programmer has been reporting news for over 10 years. You can access I Programmer Weekly through January 2012 for all titles plus book reviews and articles.
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