May Week 5
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 03 June 2017

No time to keep up with all that is going on in the developer world? Let the I Programmer team do it for you. We scour the Internet for news and put the unmissable bits together in this handy digest, with the week's book reviews and articles. 

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May 25 - 31, 2017  

 

Book Reviews

  • Building Software Teams 
    Kay Ewbank awarded this book a rating of 3.5 out of 5, concluding:
    The book is well written, concise, and explains the ideas clearly. A lot of what is in this book is well known, but in the experience of the authors, isn't done in practice. If development team leaders followed all the advice, it would undoubtedly lead to better quality software..

 

  • Java in 24 Hours (7th Edition)
  • This 2014 edition of Rogers Cadenhead's long standing book covers Java 8 and Android. Mike James awarded it a rating of 4 out of 5, concluding:
    this is a quite a good attempt at an introduction to Java, it could be better and it isn't ideal for the complete beginner but if you are prepared to work at it then you probably can use it to learn to program in Java - but it will take a lot longer than 24 one-hour sessions.

     

 

News

The Shape Of Classification Space Is Mostly Flat   Wednesday 31 May

All classification rules can be thought of as dividing up high dimensional spaces into areas that belong to different groups. Neural networks are no different, but until now we haven't had much insight into the shape of the dividing boundaries. The geometry is surprising. 

 

Jean Sammet, Programming Pioneer   Wednesday 31 May

Jean E. Sammet, the American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language and was the first woman to serve as President of ACM, passed away May 21 at the age of 89. 

 

Android Gets Architecture Components   Wednesday 31 May

Is it a sign of maturity when a system gets its own architecture components? It all depends on how you look at it.  

 

EU Cookie Law Is A Flop   Tuesday 30 May

If you are fed up with repeated requests to store a cookie, or if you feel that all sites should show the request, you might be interested to know that the whole EU Cookie Law is pretty much a flop. 

 

WC3 Front-End Web Developer Professional Certification on edX   Tuesday 30 May

This new Professional Certificate Program opens on edX today. It comprises five courses, between 4 and 6 weeks in length with a cost for certification varying from $49 to $129. Many will already be well on their way to gaining this credential as only one of the courses is new. 

 

CodeCity - Visualize Your JavaScript As A City   Monday 29 May

If you haven't encountered the idea of CodeCity before then this is going to be fun. Even if you have it is worth checking out what some familiar JavaScript code libraries look like as cities. 

 

JSON Feed - The New RSS?   Monday 29 May

JSON Feed is a new take on the web syndication format, but unlike RSS and Atom it's in JSON, not XML. So what does it try to do better?

 

One Million Programmers Want To Escape Vim   Sunday 28 May

It's like something from a horror story. One million programmers couldn't get out of Vim once they got into it. The proof? One million hits on a Stack Overflow question. 

 

AlphaGo Triumphs In China   Saturday 27 May

The Future of Go Summit has concluded with AlphaGo proving not only to be unbeatable (except when playing itself!) but also an innovative and exciting opponent that has a lot to offer human Go players.  

 

Windows Source Now In A GIT Repository   Friday 26 May

Microsoft is well on the road to transferring the Windows codebase to a single Git repo hosted on Visual Studio Team Services. This has involved scaling Git to extremely large projects and teams with a project called "Git Virtual File System". 

 

GoKa Stream Processing For Kafka   Friday 26 May

There's a new library for writing distributed stream processing applications in Go backing them with data in Kafka. GoKa aims to reduce the complexity of building highly scalable and highly available microservices. 

 

Commemorating the Creator of Prolog, Alain Colmerauer   Thursday 25 May

Alain Colmerauer, who was at the center of the research group that originated the logic programming language Prolog, passed away on May 12, 2017 at the age of 76. 

 

Github Announces Marketplace   Thursday 25 May

GitHub is launching a new Marketplace designed to help you find and buy tools to extend your workflow. This means you can get new tools without the need to create multiple accounts or set up separate payment methods. 

 

AlphGo Defeats World's Top Ranking Go Player - UPDATE   Thursday 25 May

AlphaGo has now won two of three games against the world’s number one player, Ke Jie, at the Future of Go Summit, taking place in Wuzhen China. Although this means Alpha Go has taken the match, the third game will be played on Saturday.

The Core

jQuery 3 - Implementing Promises   Monday 29 May

Promises are still a new feature in JavaScript.  This leads on to the need to promisify existing and future code. To do this you need to know a little about how promises work internally and how to make them do what you want. 

 

The Working Programmer's Guide To Language Paradigms   Thursday 25 May

You would think that we would agree on how best to program. In fact we are still warring tribes trying to make the case for our own particular view of how programming should be done. The question is:

How should we program?

It's not a difficult question to ask - but to answer it is another matter. 

 

 

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Last Updated ( Saturday, 03 June 2017 )