Catch up with everything that appeared on I Programmer last week. Our digest gives links to news coverage together with the new book review of the week and additions to Book Watch. This week Ian Elliot looks at Object Factories in JavaScript and Haary Fairhead has an introduction to the idea of the LIFO Stack.
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March 21 - 27, 2019
The Core
Just JavaScript - Object Factories Monday 25 March
Object creation is fundamental to all object-oriented languages, but in JavaScript it is left to the programmer to work out how best to do it, and often the practice that you encounter isn't the best because it's borrowed from other languages. In this extract from Ian Elliot's recent book the emphasis is on object factories rather than the more familiar constructor.
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Babbage's Bag
The LIFO Stack - A Gentle Guide Thursday 21 March
The stack is a very simple idea. It is a data structure that has only two simple operations and yet not only is it powerful, it is at the heart of modern computing, both theory and practice. Let's find out more about it.
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Book Review of the Week
Kay Ewbank awards a rating of 3.8 out of 5 to this book that, while it gives a useful overview of the MEAN stack MongoDB, Express.js, Angular and Node.js.), doesn't go into enough detail given the amount of space.
New Listings in Book Watch
News
How Gen Z Could Fill the Skills Gap Wednesday 27 March
HackerRank's Women in Tech 2019 report focuses attention on Gen Z women, born from 1997 onwards. As they are reaching their early twenties, they are beginning to enter the workforce en masse.
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Hinton, LeCun and Bengio Receive 2018 Turing Award Wednesday 27 March
Often said to be the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award goes this time round to three pioneers of neural networks. The citation refers to the three as "Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution" but I see one father and and two offspring.
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EU Copyright Directive Approved - Without Amendments Tuesday 26 March
The European Parliament has given its final approval to the controversial copyright directive, something that will severely affect Internet users across the European Union and may have wider ramifications. While there had been strong expectation that Article 13 would be deleted, this failed to happen due to mistakes in voting.
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Apache Kudu 1.9 Adds Location Awareness Tuesday 26 March
There's a new release of Apache Kudu which adds location awareness and support for Docker scripts. Kudu is a columnar storage engine that fills the gap between the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the HBase NoSQL database. Kudu provides C++, Java and Python client APIs.
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US Computer Science Is World Beating Monday 25 March
Final-year computer science undergraduates in the US substantially outperform their counterparts in China, who surpass those in Russia, who do better than those in India. Males do moderately better than females in all four countries.
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Red Hat Launches Quarkus For Kubernetes-Native Apps Monday 25 March
Red Hat has released Quarkus, a Kubernetes Native Java framework tailored for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot. The idea is to make it easier to create Java apps for serverless environments and the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration system.
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Summer Hackers Program - An Opportunity For Women Sunday 24 March
Lambda School is partnering with Y-Combinator founder Jessica Livingston to help more women in the US learn how to program, and ultimately to increase the number of women startup founders.
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Bach Google Doodle - AI Powered Creativity Saturday 23 March
To celebrate the 334th anniversary of the birth of Johann Sebastian Bach, Google produced an interactive doodle that lets you write a short melody and have it harmonized in the style of Bach.
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Google Code-In Grows Friday 22 March
The results for Google Code-in (GCI) are in, with the judges reporting big increases in entrants from Austria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Taiwan. Code-in is Google's competition for 13-17 year olds for writing open source software, used by some as a stepping stone to Google Summer of Code.
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New MSDN Blogs Broken Friday 22 March
Attention was drawn yesterday to the mess that Microsoft is making migrating the MSDN blogs to their new platform, when Eric Lippert tweeted that his blog had been taken down. Although his blog has now been restored, much of what was a rich archive is still missing and what remains difficult to navigate.
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NVIDIA Moves Real-Time Ray Tracing Forward Thursday 21 March
NVIDIA is making its Real-time Ray Tracing available on existing GTX graphics cards, including some older models. NVIDIA is also introducing GameWorks RTX, a set of tools and rendering techniques that help game developers add ray tracing to games.
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Homepage For JavaScript Standards Launched Thursday 21 March
Ecma TC39, the JavaScript Standards Committee, has launched a website for following updates to the JavaScript specification. The idea is to make it easier to find info and documentation on updates to the JavaScript spec.
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If you want to delve into I Programmer's coverage of the news over the years, you can access I Programmer Weekly back to January 2012.
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