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, Programmer's Python - Objects Become Classes and Advanced Investment Analysis

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June 30 - July 6, 2022

Featured Articles  

Programmer's Python - Objects Become Classes Mike James Everything in Python might well be an object, but if this is the case we need some way of creating new custom objects. How  objects become classes and more is explained in this extract from my book, Programmer's Python: Everything is an Object, Second Edition. + FULL STORY

Advanced Investment Analysis Janet Swift Two key functions for gauging the worth of an investment with an irregular cash flow are internal rate of return (IRR) and its counterpart XIRR for an unevenly spaced schedule of cash flows  and the modified internal rate of return (MIRR). We look at how to use them in Google Sheets. + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

Google To Pay $90 Million To Devs - But It's Not Enough 06 Jul | Lucy Black While the big fight with Epic Games continues, Google has settled a class action with an offer of $90 million, but is it just a diversionary tactic? + FULL STORY

A Boost For Developer Pay 06 Jul | Sue Gee There has been a significant increase in average developer pay over the last year. Remote working is now overwhelmingly the norm with fewer than 15% of developers having a fully in-person working environment. + FULL STORY

Tkinter - Most Popular Python GUI Framework 05 Jul | Mike James JavaScript has HTML, Java has Swing and Java FX, but how about Python? What do Python developers use to create a GUI interface. To find the answer we looked at the recently published 2021 Python Developers Survey. + FULL STORY

Amazon Announces AWS Center For Quantum Networking 05 Jul | Kay Ewbank Amazon has announced a new AWS Center for Quantum Networking (CQN). The announcement says the center has a mission to address the fundamental scientific and engineering challenges of quantum networking and to develop new hardware, software, and applications for quantum networks. + FULL STORY

TigerGraph Strengthens Cloud Features 04 Jul | Kay Ewbank TigerGraph has a new version of TigerGraph Cloud, its parallel graph database-as-a-service platform. Improvements to the new version include enterprise identity and access management, support for single login, and enhanced data security. + FULL STORY

Citus For PostgreSQL Goes Fully Open Source 04 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis Citus, the PostgreSQL extension that transforms Postgres into a distributed database, has gone completely open source with latest release, version 11. + FULL STORY

Steve Jobs Honored Posthumously With Presidential Medal of Freedom 03 Jul | Sue Gee President Joe Biden has included Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and its CEO until his untimely death in 2011, in the list of 17 recipients of Presidential Medal of Freedom who will be presented with the awards at the White House on July 7, 2022. + FULL STORY

Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5 01 Jul | Sue Gee Amazon has announced the fifth instance of the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge, which still has $1 Million on offer. New this year is that university teams will not only compete for prizes related to overall performance, but also for a separate award for scientific invention and innovation. + FULL STORY

ECMA Introduces More Permissive JavaScript License 30 Jun | Kay Ewbank There's a new alternative license for ECMAScript that is designed to be permissive regarding derivative works of a standard. It is largely based on the W3C’s Document and Software License, and one of its aims is to be better aligned with the work of the W3C. + FULL STORY

Pi Pico W $6 WiFi 30 Jun | Harry Fairhead The Raspberry Pi Pico is an amazing device that seems to have sold 2 Million since it launched last year. But until now it had one big drawback  - no WiFi. Now the newly announced Pico W gives you WiFi, and potentially BlueTooth, for $6. This breakthrough is the start of something new and important. + FULL STORY

Apache Doris Reaches Top-Level Status 30 Jun | Kay Ewbank Apache Doris has achieved Top-Level Project status at Apache. The open source realtime analytical database is massively parallel processing (MPP) based, is an MPP-based and provides interactive SQL data warehousing for reporting and analysis. + 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 helps us to continue posting.

Full Review 

• Modern Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley)
  Rating: 3.5 out of 5  Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

Verdict: Nobody is going to do wrong by reading the book, the advice and observations are all useful, but don't expect any magic bullets.

Added to Book Watch

• The Pandas Workshop (Packt)

• Istio in Action (Manning)

• Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (MIT Press)

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

From the I Programmer Library

Latest publications: 

• Programmer's Python: Everything Is An Object by Mike James

This month sees the publication of the revised second edition of Programmer's Python: Everything Is An Object in which Mike James reveals how Python has a unique and unifying approach with regards to class and objects. This is the first of a set of titles at intermediate level for the programmer who wants to understand what makes Python special and sets it apart from other programming languages, hence the strap line "Something Completely Different - which is, of course, a reference to the Monty Python TV and film brand that inspired Guido Van Rossum to name his new language. The subject is roughly speaking everything to do with the way Python implements objects. That is, in order of sophistication, metaclass; class; object; attribute; and all of the other facilities such as functions, methods and the many “magic methods” that Python uses to make it all work. 

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

This is the second of that Something Completely Different titles and explores the way that data is treated 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.

MIke James is now working on the third book in the series, Programmer's Python: Async which not only covers the latest asyncio in depth, but has all you need to know about the many approaches to async that Python provides - threads, processes,futures,tasks, schedulers. This is the book you need to understand all the options, trade-offs and gotchas. 

These books aren’t for the complete beginner and some familiarity with both object-oriented programming and Python is assumed, with the first chapter providing a quick recap. They also share an Appendix on using Visual Studio Code from Python.

• 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.