Get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer with our weekly digest. It summarizes the week's news together with links to the week's book review and the titles selected for Book Watch Archive. This week's featured articles cover how to use sockets to create a simple web server in C, which takes us into the realm of asynchronous programming, and filters in jQuery. 

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August 4 - 10, 2022 

Featured Articles  

Fundamental C - Socket Server Harry Fairhead   This extract, from my book on programming C in an IoT context explains how to use sockets to create a simple web server. Servers are more difficult because they require asychronous programming. + FULL STORY

Just jQuery The Core UI -- Filters Ian Elliot   Filters are often confused with selectors, but they are quite different and serve the important purpose of discovering the things that a simple selector cannot. + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

 

Python Continues Its Rise on TIOBE Index 10 Aug | Sue Gee The TIOBE Community Index which ranks programming languages in terms of their popularity has just had its regular monthly update and the August headline reads "Python going through the roof". + FULL STORY

100 Prisoners And A Lightbulb 10 Aug | Mike James   I have to admit that I was unaware of this interesting problem and only discovered it due to a recent review paper. It deserves to be better known as it is a fascinating algorithmic puzzle. + FULL STORY

Microsoft Launches .NET Community Toolkit 09 Aug | Kay Ewbank Microsoft has officially launched the .NET Community Toolkit, a collection of helpers and APIs that work for all .NET developers. The toolkit is part of the .NET Foundation and is maintained and published by Microsoft which says the toolkit is agnostic of any specific UI platform. + FULL STORY

Knock Yourself Out With 91 Python Videos 09 Aug | Nikos Vaggalis   The talks and tutorials presented at the 4th annual Python Web Conference are now available for free. Topics ranged from Code and Tech to Social and Career advice. + FULL STORY

Firefox Loses Users and Websites 08 Aug | Sue Gee Over the past few weeks Firefox has seen a steeper than usual decline in Monthly Active Users. Now the Canadian Credit Card company MBNA no longer lets its card holders log in to their accounts from Firefox - they are restricted to Chrome, Edge and Safari. + FULL STORY

Oracle Announces Service For Azure 08 Aug | Kay Ewbank Oracle has announced a new Oracle Service for Microsoft Azure. Using the fully managed service, Azure customers can provision, access, and operate Oracle Database services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with a familiar Azure-like experience. + FULL STORY

AI Builds Lego From The Manual 07 Aug | Lucy Black AI seems to be taking over all the pleasures. You struggle for hours to build that Lego model, but now AI can do the job for you in no time at all and so robs you of all your fun... + FULL STORY

Sony's AI Racer Wins By Being Nice 05 Aug | Sue Gee Formula 1 Racing is an aggressive sport and competition can even become vicious. Through reinforcement learning Sony's racing AI, GT Sophy, has evolved a driving style that combines speed with "etiquette" and can outrace top human competitors. This breakthrough has now been recognized with an award. + FULL STORY

Wing Python Adds Container Support 05 Aug | Kay Ewbank Wing Python has been updated with improvements including support for containers and clusters, along with a new package management tool. + FULL STORY

GitHub Releases Projects 04 Aug | Kay Ewbank GitHub has announced the general availability of GitHub Projects powered by GitHub Issues. The developers say GitHub Projects connects your planning directly to the work your teams are doing in GitHub and flexibly adapts to whatever your team needs at any point. + FULL STORY

Support For .NET 3.1 Ending This Year 04 Aug | Alex Denham Microsoft has announced that support will be ended for version 3.1 of the .NET Core Framework on December 13, 2022. This is a long- term support (LTS) version, and Microsoft says users should upgrade applications based on .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 6.0 to continue to receive support. + 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 

• Coding for Beginners, 2nd Ed (In Easy Steps)
  Rating: 4 out of 5  Reviewer: Sue Gee

From Sue's conclusion: 

I have awarded a rating of 4 to this book because I think many people [coming to programming for the first time] will find it helpful - perhaps in combination with another resource such You Tube videos which are a very popular way of taking your first steps in programming. Don't just read it - follow the instructions with the code provided - and when you find it's going too fast consult the documentation or another book.

Added to Book Watch 

• Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI (Packt)

• Bare Metal C (No Starch Press)

• Edsger Wybe Dijkstra: His Life, Work, and Legacy (ACM Books)
  

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.