It's the season where we're expected to be happy and spend time with our nearest and dearest. On the principle that you can have too much of a good thing, here is this year's list of top titles that we at I Programmer would be happy to receive as a present, give to someone we like, or just hide behind when we've had enough socialising.

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Version management in Terraform can be tricky. Here are seven important practices you should adopt when provisioning infrastructure using Terraform.

Robots have fun at Xmas too. Let's see what impressive videos their masters have created for us this year.

Christmas is a time for tradition. Finding the Christmas lights in the dark recesses of a cupboard and hanging much-loved baubles on the Christmas Tree. Running this xkcd cartoon has become a part of  I Programmer Christmas. Merry Christmas to all our readers.

Around the world children are eagerly awaiting Santa - which is something of a problem since he'll only arrive when they are fast asleep. If you want to know when he'll arrive, track Santa's progress across the globe with an app - both mobile and desktop.

JetBrains has released its annual analysis of the developer ecosystem, and this year's results show the ever-increasing hold of AI along with a rise in the importance of virtual reality.

aka Dan Kornas who runs a very successful X account about everything related to engineering ML applications. And what is he using in his tutorials? Python, of course.

Could  the festive season be complete without Donald Knuth putting on his flamboyant xmas top and talking to us about something that most of us know nothing about? Of course not.

Programmer gifts - easy idea, difficult implementation.  Here's our pick of tee-shirts for giving, buying or just wearing at any time of the year.

The GCHQ Christmas Challenge has become a pre-Christmas tradition. While it is primarily targeted at school students working in teams, GCHQ encourages both children and adults to give it a try.

Microsoft has announced version 8.4 of the .NET Community Toolkit, a collection of helpers and APIs that work for all .NET developers. The new version adds support for partial properties for the MVVM Toolkit generators along with new analyzers.

GitHub has launched GitHub Copilot Free, a free version of Copilot that provides limited access to selected features of Copilot and is automatically integrated into VS Code. The free tier is aimed at individual GitHub customers who don't have access to Copilot through an organization or enterprise. The news coincides with GitHub having 150 million developers on GitHub.

Author: Sol Rashidi
Publisher: Wiley
Date: April 2024
Pages: 224
ISBN: 978-394272631
Audience: General
Rating: 3.5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

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This is a book aimed at executives and managers who work in companies that don't yet use AI, with the aim of providing information to them about what AI offers.

This is a guide to creative projects, from crafting one-of-a-kind holiday gifts to designing heartwarming home decor. Sarah Browne sets out to make AI accessible and fun for everyone — especially women. Whether you love tech, are curious about AI, or just want fresh holiday ideas, these projects bring a modern twist to classic festivities. The book has easy, step-by-step guidance — from prompts to specific apps to holiday hacks — that turn AI into your personal Santa's helper.

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According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the Commodore 64 (C64) is officially the best-selling desktop computer model of all time. but is strangely overlooked in many computer histories. In this book Jesper Juul argues that the C64 was so popular because it was so versatile, a machine developers and users would reinvent again and again over the course of 40 years.

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