Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week includes an extract from The Trick of the Mind explaining how bits can represent anything and another article by Mike James about the invertible Bloom filter. 

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July 14 - 20, 2022 

Featured Articles  

The Trick Of The Mind - Representation Mike James We have only bits? How can sets of bits represent anything we want to work with inside a program? The answer is that everything is a number. + FULL STORY

The Invertible Bloom Filter Mike James If you think that the Bloom filter is magic, wait until you see the invertible Bloom filter. This not only keeps a record of data, it allows you to add, delete and make a list of the data you have stored. + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

ChromeOS Flex Now Supports 400 Old Machines 20 Jul | Harry Fairhead ChromeOS Flex is now available to save your old hardware from early onset obsolescence. Now almost every machine can be a "chromebook". Is this a new opportunity for apps? + FULL STORY

Shifts & Stability In Developer Landscape 20 Jul | Janet Swift There's a wealth of information in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey. After looking for changes in the programming languages used by developers the conclusion is that there's not a lot of churn. The tool that has overtaken the field is Visual Studio Code which now towers head and shoulders over its competitors. + FULL STORY

NODE-Red 3 Adds Monaco Text Editor 19 Jul | Kay Ewbank Node-RED is a visual tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services. The latest release of Node-RED 3 brings a new alternative text editor and support for continuous search. + FULL STORY

Visual Studio Code Adds Command Center And Server 19 Jul | Mike James Visual Studio Code has been updated with the addition of a Command Center and a private preview of a server that runs as a service that lets you connect to remote development machines. + FULL STORY

ScyllaDB Optimizes Mixed Workload Latency 18 Jul | Kay Ewbank There's a major new version of ScyllaDB with improvements aimed at improving performance and ease of use. These start with support for running on the AWS EC2 servers that are powered by Intel Xeon processors. The new version is available in both the commercial and open source versions of ScyllaDB. + FULL STORY

Protect The Software Supply Chain With Gitsign 18 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis Sigstore and the Linux Foundation have taken another step toward securing the software supply chain, this time focusing on the initial stage of the chain. That is, the signing of Git commits. + FULL STORY

Microsoft Launches Hardwear Clothing Range 17 Jul | Kay Ewbank Microsoft has launched a new product range - Hardwear Clothing, that the company says puts the focus on creativity and self-expression. This isn't a late April Fools Day joke, honest. + FULL STORY

What Loses Developers Precious Time? 15 Jul | Sue Gee The recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey revealed that over two thirds of professional developers encounter a knowledge silo at least once a week. It also indicated the scale of time lost searching for answers. + FULL STORY

Test of Time Paper Award For Distributed Caching Algorithms 15 Jul | Sue Gee A paper on distributed caching algorithms for content distribution networks authored by Sem Borst,Varun Gupta and Anwar Walid was selected to receive the 2022 IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award for its “significant impact on the research community”. + FULL STORY

Take The Beginner's Series to Rust 14 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis Microsoft has released a new self-paced and free curriculum for total beginners in Rust, taught by Microsoft's own employees. But first of all why Rust? why go for Rust as a beginner when there's so much choice? + FULL STORY

Apache SystemDS 3.0 Released 14 Jul | Kay Ewbank Apache SystemDS 3.0 has been released with improvements including a unified memory manager, a federated backend, and full support for the Top-K cleaning framework. + 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 

• Foundational Python For Data Science (Pearson)
  Rating: 4.5 out of 5  Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

Kay's Verdict: I thought this was a good book. It takes a very pragmatic view of what someone might need to know if they are mainly interested in getting at the data, and need a bit of Python to be able to make things work.

It's not a book I'd recommend for learning to program, but there's a lot you can still do if you know how to write (or modify) a short bit of code so you can make use of NumPy or Pandas. 

Added to Book Watch 

• DevOps for the Desperate (No Starch Press)

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: JavaScript Edition (MIT Press)

• Data Science Ethics (Oxford University 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, 2nd Ed 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.