Bits - this is what programming is all about but how do you actually work with bits? Find out in this extract from my latest book Deep C Dives.

The Computer History Museum's "This Day In History" entry for April 3rd is about John Napier, the Scottish mathematician who who died on this date in 1617. He invented logarithms and an early calculating device called Napier's Bones one of earliest of many tools by which calculation was performed before the advent of the digital computer.

Claude Code, right now in research beta, is an Agentic coding assistant addressing the CLI Warriors. It is well worth knowing about.

In March, over 1,000 developers and technologists responded to a survey conducted by Stack Overflow to discover developers' feelings about open-source AI. The results reveal a generational  divide.

The official Microsoft Azure SDK for Rust is a collection of libraries that make Rust developers' life that little bit easier in accessing various Azure services.

Camunda has announced new agentic orchestration capabilities that companies can use to model, deploy, and manage AI agents in their end-to-end processes. Camunda is also introducing AI-powered features for dynamic, intelligent decision making and process generation.

Django 5.2 has been released with the addition of support for composite primary keys, and the automatic importing of all models in the shell by default.

The surprise new entry, or rather re-entry, to the TIOBE index this month is Perl, which has jumped up from #24 last month to #19, replacing Kotlin which has tumbled to #25.

To celebrate Microsoft's 50th Anniversary, Bill Gates has shared the original Altair BASIC Source Code. However it's not been open-sourced in a GitHub repo - instead it's available as a 157-page pdf of scanned fan-fold paper! It makes for a fascinating read.

LeetGPU is a platform where you can write and test CUDA code.
Now it adds Challenges to foster competition, asking you to put your GPU programming skills to the test by writing the fastest programs.

Torsten Hoefler, a professor at ETH Zurich and Chief Architect for AI and Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, has been awarded the 2024 ACM Prize in Computing.

Microsoft has another free, self-paced AI course, intended for beginners. This one comprises 10 lessons that cover the fundamentals of building AI Agents.

Apple has announced the first stable release of Swiftly, a Swift version manager for installing, managing and updating Swift toolchains.

Author: Jordan Goldmeier
Publisher: Wiley
Date: November 2023
Pages: 448
ISBN: 978-1119931386
Audience: Excel users
Level: Introductory
Category: Data Science
Rating: 4.5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

This is an updated edition of a well regarded title which looks at accessible ways to combine statistics and machine learning, along with Excel, to discover insights in your data.

This book offers a structured approach to understanding database fundamentals, SQL programming, and data modeling best practices. James M. Reneau bridges the gap between theory and practical application by covering fundamental topics such as data modeling, normalization, and entity-relationship diagrams, all while introducing real-world database management principles. He includes step-by-step instructions on how to use MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL Server.

This autobiography of Bill Gates is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. Instead, it’s the personal story of Bill Gates' childhood, early passions and pursuits. Gates details his struggles to fit in and his discovery of a world of coding and computers in the dawn of a new era, and the path that took him from midnight escapades at a nearby computer center to his college dorm room, where he sparked a revolution that would change the world.

In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. This book catalogs Benjamin Wallace's attempt over 15 years to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought. Tracking leads from London to Oslo to Los Angeles, from coastal Australia to the Arizona desert, Wallace takes readers through a rogues’ gallery tour of Nakamoto suspects—from benevolent geniuses like cryptographer Hal Finney to difficult ones like a reclusive polymath known to his followers only as Jim; from the mercurial Australian Craig Wright, who claims to be Nakamoto, to a secret team at the National Security Agency.