If you've not visited I Programmer before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to the latest feature articles and to our wide ranging news with its mix of analysis and comment. It also lists the week's addition to Book Watch Archive and our Book Review of the Week.

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 May 5 - 11, 2022

Featured Articles  

The Trick Of The Mind - On Being Variable Mike James This chapter of my new book on the nature of programming is aimed at both programmers and non-programmers. In this extract we look at the idea of a variable, something that confuses the beginner and expert alike. + FULL STORY

Just jQuery The Core UI - The DOM Ian Elliot From the point of view of a JavaScript programmer, the User Interface (UI) is created by HTML tags in the web page. When HTML was first invented there was no intention for it to be the UI for a programming language and so a connection between the elements that make up a page and the code had to be engineered. The result was the Document Object Model, DOM.  + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

FIDO Provides Security Without Passwords 11 May | Sue Gee Apple, Google, and Microsoft have jointly announced plans to expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. The new capability will allow websites and apps to offer consistent, secure, and easy passwordless sign-ins to consumers across devices and platforms. + FULL STORY

Android Studio Chipmunk - Cute But Increasingly Unfit For Purpose 11 May | Mike James The latest release of Android Studio has many fixes and many additions, but is still on track to be sidelined by something better. Android development is a mess and the tools just aren't helping. + FULL STORY

GitHub To Require Two-Factor Authentication 10 May | Kay Ewbank GitHub will require all users who contribute code on GitHub.com to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of 2023. + FULL STORY

CanIPHP - Like CanIUse But For PHP 10 May | Ian Elliot A new tool called CanIPHP has been released. As the name suggests, the tool is like caniuse.com but for PHP features. + FULL STORY

Integrate Azure and Spring with Spring Cloud Azure 09 May | Nikos Vaggalis Spring Cloud Azure is an open-source project that provides seamless Spring integration with Azure services. It has now reached version 4.0. + FULL STORY

Oracle's Java Losing Out To Amazon's 09 May | Janet Swift From having around three-quarters of the Java market in 2022, its share has now fallen to just over a third. In the same period Amazon has gone from a 2% share to 22%. + FULL STORY

Starship Robots On The Move 08 May | Lucy Black Starship Robots complete tens of thousands of autonomous deliveries a day all over the world. Clearly this is a good idea, an idea who's time has more than come. What will it take for them to become commonplace? + FULL STORY

On This Day In 1949 EDSAC Performs Stored Program Calculation 06 May | Sue Gee On May 6, 1949 EDSAC entered into computer history by performing its first calculation. Built immediately after World War II at the University of Cambridge, England under the direction of Sir Maurice Wilkes the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator has the status of being the first practical stored-program computer. + FULL STORY

Girl Guides Expand Digital Tech Activities With Google 06 May | Kay Ewbank The Girl Guides organization in the UK is extending its partnership with Google to show girls of all ages that technology can be made by everyone and is for anyone. + FULL STORY

WCF 1.0 Released With Microsoft Support 05 May | Mike James Version 1.0 of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has been released. WCF is the subset of  the .NET Framework given to the community by Microsoft back in 2019. The new release comes with support from Microsoft. + FULL STORY

Apache Ignite Changes SQL Engine 05 May | Kay Ewbank Apache Ignite has been updated to use a new SQL engine based on Apache Calcite, and new 'read repair' strategies. + FULL STORY

Books of the Week

If you want to purchase, or to know more about, any of the titles listed below from Amazon, click on the book jackets at the top of the right sidebar. If you do make Amazon purchases after this, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a small source of revenue that enables us to continue posting.

Full Review 

• Seriously Good Software (Manning)
  Rating: 4.5 out of 5   
  Reviewer: Mike James

Mike James concludes his review with:

This isn't an essential book to read. I'd also say that you would get more out of it if you had suffered a formal course on some of the topics and wanted something to relate it all to the real world. If you are lacking in the core ideas then I think this book would be insufficient, apart from making you realize that there is more to learn. It is also difficult to say what the specific learning achievements are in reading the book, apart from "I must do better".

Not a book for everyone but well-written and a nice read.

Added to Book Watch

• Programmer’s Python: Everything is Data (I/O Press)
• Java For Dummies, 8th Ed (Wiley)
• Visualizing Google Cloud (Wiley)

More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive.

From the I Programmer Library

Published this month:

• Programmer's Python: Everything is Data by Mike James

This is the second of our Something Completely Different titles that look at what makes Python special and sets it apart from other programming languages. These books aren’t for the complete beginner and some familiarity with both object-oriented programming and Python is assumed. The first in the series, Programmer’s Python: Everything is an Object, about to be available in its second edition, reveals how Python has a unique and unifying approach with regards to class and objects. Following the same philosophy the language also treats data in a distinctly Pythonic way. What we have in Python are data objects that are very usable and very extensible. From the unlimited precision integers, referred to as bignums, through the choice of a list to play the role of the array, to the availability of the dictionary as a built-in data type, Python behaves differently to other languages and this book is what you need to help you make the most of these special features. There are also complete chapters on Boolean logic, dates and times, regular expressions and bit manipulation.

Recently published:

• The Trick Of The Mind: Programming and Computational Thought by Mike James 

Programmers think differently from non-programmers, they see and solve problems in a way that the rest of the world doesn't. In this book Mike James takes programming concepts and explains what the skill involves and how a programmer goes about it. In each case, Mike looks at how we convert a dynamic process into a static text that can be understood by other programmers and put into action by a computer. If you're a programmer, his intent is to give you a clearer understanding of what you do so you value it even more.