If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, our weekly digest summarizes the articles and news written each day by programmers, for programmers. This week Harry Fairhead looks at multitasking and we have a round up of books on R, the popular language for statistics, data analysis and data mining.   

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June 9 - 15, 2022

Featured Articles  

Really Good R Books Kay Ewbank R's popularity as a language for statistics, data analysis and data mining is increasing year on year, and as you'd expect there are some good books on the subject. R's strengths mean it is one of the most commonly used programming languages used in data mining. In this guide, we've highlighted the best of the R books that we've reviewed on I Programmer. + FULL STORY

Multitasking Harry Fairhead We take multitasking for granted now, but it was a difficult technology to get right - and still is. We take a look at how it all developed and at the variations on the basic idea. + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

 

Suspended For Claiming AI Is Sentient 15 Jun | Mike James Can a large language model be sentient? This is a news item that has been doing the rounds and just about everyone has some comment to make about it.  But who better to comment than a man accused of killing a sentient AI - me! + FULL STORY

Rust Fast And Safe 15 Jun | Harry Fairhead Rust is one of the few innovative languages threatening to shake up the old order, but is it really so good? A new research survey suggests that it really does seem to be both safer and faster, which is remarkable. + FULL STORY

JetBrains Updates Datalore BI Platform 14 Jun | Kay Ewbank JetBrains has updated Datalore Enterprise, its data science and BI platform, to add support for Docker-based installation. The Docker support means Datalore can be set up quickly in AWS, GCP, Azure or on an on-premises machine by running one Docker command. + FULL STORY

200 Years Ago Charles Babbage Proposed His Difference Engine 14 Jun | Mike James Two hundred years ago today, on June 14, 1822 Charles Babbage presented a one-page note to the Royal Astronomical Society in London setting out his plans to build a Difference Engine that would use a clockwork mechanism to solve polynomial equations.  + FULL STORY

Perl 5.36 Released - What's New? 13 Jun | Nikos Vaggalis Perl 5.36 was recently released and comes with many great features. It's a prelude to Perl 7 but might prove more than that since 7's future is still uncertain. + FULL STORY

Apache HOP 2.0 Released 13 Jun | Kay Ewbank Apache Hop 2.0 has been released. The Hop orchestration platform is an open source data integration platform in which everything is treated as metadata, meaning it can work with most data platforms. HOP 2.0 has upgraded to Java 11 and added a number of transformation plug-ins. + FULL STORY

Videos From Inaugural Computer History Conference 12 Jun | Sue Gee The First International Research Conference on the History of Computing, dubbed Computing's Woodstock, gathered together a global elite of computer pioneers. It took place in June 1976 and now the Computer History Museum has restored 21 video recordings of its sessions and posted them on its YouTube channel. + FULL STORY

Bash-Oneliner and GameShell Teach Unix Command Line 10 Jun | Nikos Vaggalis Two great resources, one for beginners and one for intermediate users, for learning the Unix, well, Linux shell. + FULL STORY

Apple Improves Developer Support 10 Jun | Kay Ewbank Apple has announced a range of new tools and technologies at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), including making Xcode Cloud open to all members of the Apple Developer Program. + FULL STORY

GitHub Is Retiring Atom 09 Jun | Sue Gee GitHub has announced that it is shutting down the Atom editor in six months time. Why is it doing this and what should its users do? + FULL STORY

CockroachDB Adds Hash Sharded Indexes 09 Jun | Kay Ewbank Cockroach DB has been updated with what the developers say is a variety of management, performance, security, and compatibility improvements. + 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 

• Discovering Modern C++, 2nd Ed
  Rating: 5 out of 5  Reviewer: Mike James

Verdict: This is an excellent book as long as you are not a complete beginner and are a scientist or similar and are particularly interested in C++ as a numerical or scientific programming language. If you fall outside of this target audience then how much you will like the book depends entirely on how far outside the audience you are. I think that the general C++ programmer could get a lot of fun out of reading this book.

Added to Book Watch

• C++ Programming 6th Ed (In Easy Steps)
• Programming in Ada 2012, 2nd Ed (Cambridge University Press)

• Learn Python through Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales (Sundae Electronics)

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.