| August Week 4 |
| Written by Editor | ||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 31 August 2019 | ||||||||||||||
|
If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, our weekly digest summarizes the articles, book reviews and news written each day by programmers, for programmers. This week we start with an extract from The Programmer's Guide to Kotlin and we also have The Working Programmer's Guide to Variables. To receive this digest automatically by email, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
August 22 - 28, 2019
Book Review of the Week
New Listings in Book Watch
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.
To keep up with the latest news and receive this digest automatically by email, sign up for our weekly newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, where you are welcome to share all our stories.
You can also subscribe to our RSS Feeds - we have one for Full Contents, another for News and also one for Books with details of reviews and additions to Book Watch.
<ASIN:1871962536>
<ASIN:B07S4LYXHG>
<ASIN:1119555019>
<ASIN:1119579333>
<ASIN:1840788739>
<ASIN:1683924037> |
||||||||||||||
| Last Updated ( Saturday, 31 August 2019 ) |
Kotlin provides enums just like Java but you need to keep in mind how they are implemented if you are to understand how to use them. As an alternative you can use sealed classes but are these really better than an enum? In this extract from the book on Kotlin by Mike James we look at how to work with and understand enums and sealed classes. 
Many programmers are confused by the range of variations that there are on the humble variable - mainly because the idea is so basic that we just "pick it up" as we go along. This explanation doesn't cover all the possibilities, but enough of them for you to grasp the rest. 
Does code quality matter in open source? New research suggests that we value other things.
Python's 2's end of life is fast approaching and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre has issued a warning to developers still clinging on to Python 2 of risks they will face as a result of no more bug fixes or security updates. 
In a break with tradition, the next version of Android is not going to share a name beginning with Q with some dessert or sweet treat. Instead it will be known by its number - Android 10. 
Significant features on this path are batch-style recovery for batch jobs and a preview of the new Blink-based query engine for Table API and SQL queries. 
Coursera has added another Machine Learning Specialization. Its distinguishing feature is that is targeted at those working in finance, medicine, engineering, business or other domains where machine learning is taking hold. 
Apache Bigtop has been updated with a new version of its integration test Framework, and a newly developed Smoke Test CI Matrix to guard the quality of releases. 
August 25th is taken to be the official birthday of the Linux. What's so special about 28? Well we managed to miss 21 and 25 so we are making sure we mark it this time around
Open source is wonderful - except when it isn't. The latest mini-disaster, let's not get carried away, is that the creator and maintainer of wiringPi has given up, frustrated with the way people, aka users, treat his code and him. 
Freelance developers at the forefront of today's technology are in demand. The global freelancing platform, Upwork, just has published hourly rates for the most lucrative jobs for independent contractors and it's official - freelancers can rake in impressive sums. 
There's a major update to Ruby on Rails that adds an action mailbox, action text, ability to use multiple databases, and parallel testing. The new version also supports Webpacker by default and Zeitwerk. 
I'm past the phase of being excited at each new Android Studio release. This one is supposed to be much improved - but is it enough? 
Researchers have broken Bluetooth's encryption key negotiation protocol using an attack they've called KNOB - Key Negotiation Of Bluetooth. The vulnerability affects almost all devices that support Bluetooth, but Google has already announced patches for Android devices.