This weekly digest is a summary of our news and book coverage plus our latest articles. This week Harry Fairhead has instructions for setting up a Windows Remote Desktop connection to a Raspberry Pi under Bullseye, the latest Pi OS and  Ian Elliot looks at DOM traversal flters in jQuery.

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August 25 - 31, 2022 

Featured Articles  

Remote Desktop To A Headless Pi Running Bullseye Harry Fairhead Connecting to a Raspberry Pi using Windows Remote Desktop is really useful, but the latest Pi OS (Bullseye) has made it slightly more difficult than before. Find out how to fix it. + FULL STORY

Just jQuery The Core UI - DOM Traversal Filters Ian Elliot When you first encounter filters they seem easy enough - just extract the results you want from the results you have. The trouble is that filters are fun and jQuery pushes the idea beyond the obvious. Here we look at traversal filters and more. + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

Android SDK For Multi-Device Apps 31 Aug | Mike James I have enough problems dealing with a single device, let alone being able to juggle running on more than one device! A new SDK from Google tries to encourage you to go multi-device. + FULL STORY

Alexa Teacher Models Outperform GPT-3 31 Aug | Sue Gee Researchers at Amazon Alexa AI are making breakthroughs in conversational AI and natural language processing using models that learn new concepts and transfer knowledge from one language or task to another with minimal human input.  + FULL STORY

MariaDB Moves Into GeoSpatial Space 30 Aug | Kay Ewbank MariaDB has made two announcements relevant to geospatial data management. Firstly, the company has acquired geospatial specialists CubeWerx, and followed up this announcement with the news they're joining the Open Geospatial Consortium. + FULL STORY

Amazon Announces AWS Visual Embedding 30 Aug | Ian Elliot Amazon has announced a new tool for AWS that can be used to embed dashboards into high-traffic web pages and applications. + FULL STORY

New Graduates Want To Work At Google 29 Aug | Sue Gee Asked to nominate the companies they wanted to work for, 44% of Computer Science students chose Google. This is hardly news since it's the fifth year in a row Google that occupied the top position in Universum's ranking.  + FULL STORY

Next.js Updates Runtime 29 Aug | Kay Ewbank Next.js has been updated with a new, better, runtime along with a new package that extends what’s possible with Next.js Middleware. Next.js is an open-source toolkit for universal, server-rendered (or statically pre-rendered) React.js applications. + FULL STORY

Geoffrey Hinton Awarded Royal Society's Premier Medal 28 Aug | Sue Gee Geoffrey Hinton, pioneer of neural networks and deep learning, has been awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of sciences.  + FULL STORY

Fast.ai's Practical Deep Learning for Coders Has Been Updated 26 Aug | Nikos Vaggalis Fast.ai has just published an update to its free online course Practical Deep Learning for Coders. The update covers new techniques and libraries and for continuity the original 2020 version is still available. + FULL STORY

Julia 1.8 Improves Apple Silicon Support 26 Aug | Kay Ewbank Julia 1.8 has been released with improvements including better support for Apple Silicon, and support for typed globals. + FULL STORY

Google To Shut Cloud IoT Core 25 Aug | Harry Fairhead Google has notified users of its IoT Core managed service that it is to be discontinued next August. Users are justifiably critical of the "sunsetting" of yet another Google service - but Google is defending the decision by pointing out that it is giving plenty of time for users to find suitable alternatives. + FULL STORY

Apache Iceberg Improves Spark Support 25 Aug | Kay Ewbank Apache Iceberg 0.14 has been released with improvements to support for Spark and a common REST catalog client that uses change-based commits to resolve commit conflicts on the server side. + 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 

• Clean Craftsmanship (Pearson/Addison-Wesley)
  Rating: 4 out of 5  Reviewer: Mike James

This book is motivational. It makes you want to get out of your seat and... or is it get into your seat as we are programming, .... do better. Uncle Bob's books aren't academic works on methodology but they sure are a pick-me-up.

Added to Book Watch 

• Programming and Problem Solving with C++, 7th Ed
  (Jones & Bartlett Learning)

• Oracle Database Programming with Java
  (Auerbach Publications)

• If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable
  (Wiley)
  

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.