May Week 4
Our weekly digest lists the news of the week, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. The first featured article of this week comes from Fundamental C: getting closer to the machine and examine 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
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Fundamental C – Expressions This excerpt from my book on C programming in an IoT context explains the fundamental importance of expression. From simple to sophisticated, you have to master it. |
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The basics of pointers Although pointers have long been considered “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 come from. Pointers are a sophisticated abstraction that wraps around some fundamental principles of assembly language. |
Programming News and Views
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Microsoft introduces Dev Box and Azure Deployment Environments Microsoft Dev Box is a new Azure cloud service for hybrid development teams that provides developers with secure, ready-to-code workstations. A new portal allows Dev Boxes to be pre-configured for specific projects and tasks so individual developers can get right to work without the overhead of workstation setup. |
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GOV.UK abandons jQuery jQuery used to be essential – now it’s optional, right? The developers at GOV.UK have made a big fuss to finally get rid of the evil code. But is losing 32k downloads worth it when you take everything into account? |
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Developer FairEmail withdraws from the Play Store Is it a good idea to be an Android app developer? Not according to a recent case reported on XDA Developers, where the developer of a popular open-source email client decided enough was enough, and ceased development and removed all of its apps from Google Play. |
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Apache OpenJPA – Life beyond hibernation? Apache OpenJPA is the Apache Software Foundation’s Java persistence project. After some time under the radar, there’s a new release. Let’s examine this. |
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Turing-ISR: AI-powered image enhancements Using the power of deep learning, the Microsoft Turing team has built a model to improve image quality and is integrating its new technology called Turing Image Super Resolution into Bing Maps and the Edge browser. |
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PostgreSQL 15 beta released The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has made the first beta version of PostgreSQL 15 available for download. Improvements in the new version include Merge support and more advanced JSON support. |
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What’s new with Spot From nuclear environments to construction sites to manufacturing facilities, Boston Robotic’s quadruped Spot robot proves that agile mobile robots can serve a useful role in a wide range of applications. Spot recently had hardware upgrades, including a new tablet and two new additions to its payload lineup. |
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Google launches the ARCore geospatial API Google has launched the ARCore Geospatial API in the ARCore SDKs for Android and iOS on all ARCore-enabled devices. ARCore is Google’s AR development platform that provides development tools for creating augmented reality applications that blend the digital and physical worlds. |
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The Grace Hopper Prize recognizes contribution to secure computing Raluca Ada Popa, associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for Designing Secure Distributed Systems. These systems protect privacy from attackers with full access to servers while maintaining full functionality. |
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Kafka adds a KRaft-based authorizer Apache Kafka, the distributed streaming platform that can be used to create real-time streaming data pipelines between systems or applications, has been updated with improvements including a KRaft-based authorization mechanism and a proposal to mark KRaft mode as production-ready in Apache Kafka 3.3. |
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Striim launched on Google Cloud A new service that offers Google Cloud customers real-time streaming data integration and analysis has been launched by Striim. Striim Cloud on Google Cloud is considered the fastest way for customers to deliver real-time data and insights to power business intelligence and decision-making. |
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 pennies through the Amazon Associates program, which is a small revenue stream that allows us to continue publishing.
Full review
Ian Stirk concludes his review with:
This book aims to help you reduce your Azure costs, and it certainly succeeds. The subject matters both to bill payers and to the planet.
There are many options available to reduce your Azure bill, focusing on provisioning, cleanup, and reservations. The book is generally easy to read, with helpful discussions, diagrams, sample workflows, and links for more information. Some of the initial chapters may seem a little dry to a technologist, but stick with it, they provide a useful foundation for the central middle chapters.
Added to Watch Book
More recently published books can be found in Archives of book watches.
From the I Programmer library
Published this month:
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.
Recently published:
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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