April Week 2
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 14 April 2018

If you need to know what's important for the developer, you can rely on I Programmer to sift through the news and uncover the most interesting stories. Our weekly digest also covers the week's articles, books reviews and additions to Book Watch.

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 5 - 11 April, 2018

 

Book Watch

This week's additions to our ever-growing archive of newly published computer books are:   

Book Reviews 

  • Android: Pocket Primer

    Giving this book for programmers interested in Android development a rating of 4 (out of 5) Mike James explains:
    As a lightening overview for a programmer skilled in Java and knowing roughly what to expect from a framework like Android, this is a reasonable guide. If you are a beginner then you need something slower paced.

  • Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ (2e)

    Asked to nominate a book that has a permanent place on his personal bookshelf, Mike James selected this classic as one suitable for beginners wanting to understand programming. Giving it a rating of 4.9 out of 5 he comments: 
    Who better to learn C++ from than the man who invented C++ and depending on how you view things was, and is, a hero or set the course of programming back many years!

News

The State of Agile   Wednesday 11 AprilagilerePTSQ

While still far from maturity, agile is growing and organizations are realizing the benefits they set out to achieve by adopting the methodology.

 

What Makes A Fast Typist   Wednesday 11 April

When you think about how important a keyboard still is in these days of voice and touch, it makes you wonder why keyboard skills aren't part of a modern education. But what makes a good, fast typist? An analysis of 136 million keystrokes provides some answers.

 

National Robotics Week Across the USA   Wednesday 11 April

Its the annual Robotics Week in the United States, with events scheduled for all 50 states. This is the eighth year Robotics Week has been celebrated.

 

Learn From Top Kagglers   Tuesday 10 April

A course in which top Kaggler's share their expertise has just restarted on Coursera. It is part of a new set of courses that comprise a recently introduced Advanced Machine Learning Specialization.

 

Microsoft To Spend $5 Billion On IOT   Tuesday 10 April

Microsoft has announced it will invest $5 billion in research, products and services for the Internet of Things (IoT) over the next four years.

 

Microsoft Kills Touch Develop - Tells Teachers Get Scripts Marked By May 23   Monday 09 April

Microsoft is a mess when it comes to anything off the main track of Azure. However, you might think that it was OK to trust the company's intentions toward education. It is a win-win situation. The teachers get the tools they need and Microsoft gets their hearts and minds. Then why did Microsoft just kill its Touch Develop tool at the core of its education through games program?

 

Git 2.17 Clarifies Moved Code   Monday 09 April

Git 2.17 has been released with support for coloring moved code, and new hooks to speed up status.

 

Would You Prefer A Robot?   Sunday 08 April

A recent survey in the UK revealed that 1 in 4 people would prefer to have a robot as their political representative, although only 11% and 14% wanted AI assistance for medical and legal assistance respectively.

 

Retro Game AI Contest   Saturday 07 April

OpenAI has launched a transfer learning contest using the Sonic The Hedgehog series of games for SEGA Genesis. The challenge is to create the best agent for playing custom levels of the Sonic games — without having access to those levels during development.

 

Amazon Transcribe & Translate Ready For Work   Friday 06 April

Amazon has two new services with APIs ready to be built into your apps. Transcribe will convert speech to text and Translate translates text into another language.

 

Data Science Course For Everyone Now Online   Friday 06 April

Launched on campus in 2015 Foundations of Data Science is Berkeley's fastest growing program with more than 1,000 students enrolling every semester. Now it is available on edX as a Professional Certificate made up of three 5-week courses.

 

CockroachDB Adds GDPR Compliance   Friday 06 April

CockroachDB 2.0 has been released with geo-partitioning features that keep data close to the customer, and support for JSON. The developers also say there are new benchmarks showing it can handle ten times more throughput than Amazon Aurora.

 

Natural Conversations for Microsoft Xiaolce Chatbot   Thursday 05 April

Microsoft has made another technological breakthrough towards enabling chatbots to have natural interaction with humans. Borrowing the term "full duplex" from telecommunications jargon, the new ability is for two-way communication, akin to listening and speaking at the same time.

 

GitHub Enterprise Adds Team Discussions   Thursday 05 April

GitHub Enterprise 2.13 has been released with new ways for teams to track information, manage permissions and build custom workflows. GitHub Enterprise is designed to give large companies a way to deploy GitHub in their own environments. This means it can be used locally to manage custom apps designed for their own users.

 

Projects

Micro:bit Commando Jump Using MakeCode  Monday 09 April

The Micro:bit is quite a capable computer, but it does have one limitation - it only has a 5x5 LED matrix display. What sort of game could you possibly program on that?!

 

History

The Early History of the Internet   Thursday 05 April

The Internet is now a boon and a blessing to individuals and businesses around the world in fact its is difficult to imagine the modern world without it. But look back over 40 years and you'll find that the Internet as we know it today was born out of the cold war between the USA and the USSR.

 


 

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Last Updated ( Saturday, 14 April 2018 )