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It's hard to keep up with all the developments in the developer world. I Programmer's team cover a wide range of topics with comment and analysis. Here's a summary of the latest new content.
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August 24 - 30, 2017
Book Reviews
- C# 7 and .NET Core: Modern Cross-Platform Development 2e
Mike James thinks that now is a good time to learn C#, but isn't sure this is the right book. He awards it a rating of 3 out of 5, concluding:
This is not a beginner's book and it isn't an expert's book as it doesn't go deep into anything. What it is, is a broad survey of the existing state of .NET Core and C#. If this is what you are looking for then you might find it useful.
- JavaScript Cookbook 2e
Ian Elliot awarded a rating of 4.5 stars writing:
My only reservation about the book is that it might have been a lot better as an intermediate to advanced JavaScript textbook, abandoning the cookbook style. Of course, if you like your information in recipe-style chunks then you will not agree.
Programmer Puzzles
The Disaster Team Puzzle Monday 28 August
Put on your thinking cap for another challenge that requires computational thinking. This time Melvin Frammis and his junior partner Bugsy Cottman need to respond to an emergency.
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News
Google's Songbird Brings Ambisonics To The Web Wednesday 30 August
Spatial audio, when done right, is amazing and best through a pair of headphones. We only have two ears, but somehow we manage to hear things in 3D up, down, left, right and back and front. With the advent of the Web Audio API, spatial audio is possible and Songbird makes it easy.
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School Bus Optimization Wednesday 30 August
An algorithm to optimize school bus routes will save Boston Public Schools as much as $5 million after computer science and logistics experts competed in a 3 month hackathon won by a team from MIT's Operations Research Centre.
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Transcription On Par With Human Accuracy Tuesday 29 August
The Speech & Dialogue Research Group, part of Microsoft Artificial and Intelligence and Research have achieved a new conversational speech recognition milestone with word error rate reduced to 5.1 percent.
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Go 1.9 Adds Parallel Compilation Tuesday 29 August
Go 1.9 has been released with support for parallel compilation of functions for a package. It also adds support for type aliases.
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Hacking Alexa By Whispering In Her Ear Monday 28 August
Apologies for the over-the-top headline. The technique works with any voice-driven assistant and, yes I know, Alexa doesn't have ears. The idea is simple and it seems fairly effective. It allows you to get voice commands to Alexa that that are inaudible to people in the same room.
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Popular Python Course Updated Monday 28 August
One of earliest introductory computer science courses on the edX platform has been given a facelift and now uses Python 3.5. The first of a two-course sequence, it restarts on August 30th.
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Indoor Navigation - A Use For That Magnetometer Sunday 27 August
Nearly all smart phones have a magnetometer which works like a 3D compass - but the question is what to do with it? Microsoft Research has an app that uses it to navigate through buildings - who needs GPS!
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New Proof That P≠NP: Update - Probably Not Saturday 26 August
Proofs that P=NP, and even for the less exciting and more likely P≠NP, abound. Most of them by enthusiasts who, usually, can be commended for their enthusiasm, but not so much for their proofs. However, the latest proof is by a respected complexity theorist and can't be dismissed in the usual way.
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A New Rift for Node.js Friday 25 August
The Node.js community faces a new crisis which has led to a new fork of the project. Ayo.js. The fact that "ayo" is pronounced the same as "io" is a reference to the previous major fork of the project. However, the motivation for this split is very different.
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Safari Will Remove AMP Links Friday 25 August
Browsers are supposed to simply read the standard HTML and render it faithfully - but of course we know they don't. Now Apple's Safari is starting to rewrite URLs from Google's AMP cache to point to the original material. This might be good in this case, but the general principle is a slippery slope.
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The Stars Lie - App Ratings In Conflict Thursday 24 August
It isn't just restricted to app ratings. How often to you see a low star rating and then read the review only to find that there is a conflict between what has been said and the number of stars awarded? What is going on? Are the users simply logically inconsistent beings? Of course they are!
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Entity Framework Core 2 Released With Drawbacks Thursday 24 August
Microsoft has released the final version of Entity Framework Core 2.0, alongside .NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0. Entity Framework (EF) Core is the lightweight cross-platform version of Entity Framework, the Object/Relational Mapping (O/RM) framework for .NET.
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Professional Programmer
JavaScript Beginners Book Choice Thursday 24 August
In almost a decade I Programmer's book reviewers have read and commented on over 1500 programming titles. That's only a fraction of the programming books published, but we try to cover the important ones. In Programmer's Bookshelf we recommend the books you might find helpful at different stages in your personal development.
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