This is an extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday. As well as listing the week's news items, it also includes the week's Book Review, additions to Book Watch and latest news from the I Programmer Library. Top of the list come the week's two feature articles, JavaScript Canvas - Web Workers and Getting Started With NetLogo.

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June 2 - 8, 2022

Featured Articles  

JavaScript Canvas - Web Workers Ian Elliot Graphics needs processing power.  In this extract from Ian Elliot's book on JavaScript Graphics we look at how to get started with Web Workers to get the job done faster. + FULL STORY

Getting Started With NetLogo Mike James NetLogo is a remarkable language that is fine-tuned for particular types of application - agent-based simulation. Oh, yes, and did I mention it was Logo, complete with turtle graphs. + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

 

Python 3.11 Goes Faster 08 Jun | Mike James Python doesn't do a bad job of being fast given how sophisticated it is, but it seems it is about to do a whole lot better according to independent benchmarks. Version 3.11 incorporates many of the changes promised in the Faster CPython project. + FULL STORY

Python Is Everywhere - 2021 Survey Results 08 Jun | Janet Swift The results of the 2021 Python Developers Survey, conducted as a collaborative effort between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains have been published. We take a look. + FULL STORY

Firefox Add-On For Local Private Translation 07 Jun | Sue Gee Mozilla has released the Firefox Translations add-on which lets you translate websites in Firefox without using the cloud. This is the latest development of the ongoing Project Bergamot, which is building machine translation tools to enable Mozilla to offer website translation that operates locally so that no data is sent to the cloud. + FULL STORY

MongoDB 6 Adds Encrypted Query Support 07 Jun | Kay Ewbank MongoDB 6 has been released with improvements aimed at letting developers innovate more rapidly. To achieve this the new release has integrated features into the core database platform including application search, real time application analytics and device sync. + FULL STORY

TypeScript 4.7 Adds Node.js ECMAScript Module Support 06 Jun | Kay Ewbank TypeScript 4.7 has been released with improvements including ECMAScript module support in Node.js, instantiation expressions, and control-flow analysis for computed properties. + FULL STORY

pg_ivm - Materialised Views On Steroids 06 Jun | Nikos Vaggalis pg_ivm is an extension module for PostgreSQL 14 that provides an Incremental View Maintenance (IVM) feature.That means that materialized views are updated immediately after a base table is modified. + FULL STORY

ICRA 2022 It's A Wrap 05 Jun | Lucy Black ICRA 2022, the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference took place in Philadelphia at the end of May. There were 8K participants from 97 countries with 4.7K of them attending in-person. + FULL STORY

Amazon Adds Geofences To Amplify Geo 03 Jun | Kay Ewbank Amazon has added support for Geofences to Amplify Geo. Amplify Geo can be used to add location-aware features to web applications, and developers can now display geometric boundaries using a cloud-connected UI widget and APIs from Amplify Geo. + FULL STORY

What Is the Shift-Left Approach in DevOps? 03 Jun | Austin Dease The short answer is that it is a methodology that brings software testing into earlier stages of the software development lifecycle. We look at the importance of this new approach and how to implement it. + FULL STORY

Agent-Based Modelling On Complexity Explorer 02 Jun | Sue Gee For anybody interested in how to use agent-based modeling to understand and examine a widely diverse and disparate set of complex problems, the Santa Fe Institute's online course, Introduction to Agent-Based Modelling begins on June 7th on Complexity Explorer. + FULL STORY

Microsoft Launches Power Pages Website Builder 02 Jun | Kay Ewbank Microsoft has announced a new way of creating business websites. Power Pages is a standalone product that is part of the wider Power Platform product family. + 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 

• Python Programming with Design Patterns
  Rating: 1 out of 5  Reviewer: Mike James

There was a time that design patterns were all the thing. Not so much now. But Python - does it have design patterns?

Added to Book Watch

• Software Design Patterns for Java Developers
  (BPB Publications)
• Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step 10th Ed
  (Microsoft Press)

• Coding with Python (In Easy Steps)

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

From the I Programmer Library

Latest publications:

• 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.

• 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.