Software architecture - the planning, designing and overseeing the construction of software systems - is an area that deserves more consideration than it usually gets. This addition to Programmer's Bookshelf highlights the best of the books on software architecture that we've reviewed on I Programmer.

How ARPAnet and ALOHAnet led to Ethernet and culminated in the Internet we rely on today, and the man responsible, Robert Metcalfe.

The latest iteration of the RedMonk Language Rankings dated June 2022 shows no change at the top of the table, where JavaScript still reigns supreme, ahead of Python which retains second place, relegating Java to a close third. Lower down the ladder TypeScript and Kotlin are on the up while Scala is slipping down.

Python 3.11 is now officially the latest stable version of Python and it is time to see what the new kid on the block offers - mainly speed, but there are some other important additions.

Sigstore has announced the General Availability of its free software signing service giving open source communities access to production-grade stable services for artifact signing and verification.

The developers of ImageSharp, a modern, cross-platform, 2D Graphics library for .NET, have changed their licensing terms and have left the .NET Foundation.

Error Prone is a new Java compiler plugin created by Google which checks your code for common errors at compile-time. Not does only Error Prone identify issues but suggests their fixes too by analyzing the code’s abstract syntax tree (AST).

Node.js 19 has been released with improvements including an update of the V8 JavaScript engine to 10.7, and the enabling by default of HTTP(s)/1.1 KeepAlive.

The US Postal Service has issued a commemorative stamp to honor the service of some 11,000 women cryptologists during World War II. A message to be decrypted is included in the margins around the pane of 20 stamps, which are issued as Forever stamps.

OpenSilver 1.1 has been released with improvements including over 100 new Silverlight features and three times faster performance compared to version 1.0. The open-source alternative to Silverlight is capable of running large, complex legacy applications, as well as newly written C# and XAML applications.

Sub-titled, "Make your own 2D game engine using C++ and ECS", this is a course for students interested in learning the fundamentals of game programming and game engine architecture.

When your code doesn't behave as it should, your first port of call is probably Stack Overflow. But what if you don't have access to the Internet? This is the problem solved by Overflow Offline which is unveiled today.

Bun, the new JavaScript runtime, has been updated to add hot reloading and zero-downtime restarts. Unusually for open source software it also seems to have cooked up a storm over its choice of benchmarks.

Author: Dr. Felienne Hermans
Publisher: Manning
Date: September 2021
Pages: 256
ISBN: 978-1617298677
Rating: 4
Reviewer: Mike James
Programmers have a brain - but what is it doing? 

This understandable guide that helps you engineer your first NLP algorithms. Dr. Ekaterina Kochmar uses Python code and hands-on projects, with each chapter providing a concrete example with practical techniques that you can put into practice right away. If you're a beginner to NLP and want to upgrade your applications with functions and features like information extraction, user profiling, and automatic topic labeling, this is the book for you.

In this book, Bjarne Stroustrup provides an overview of ISO C++, C++20 with the aim of giving experienced programmers a clear understanding of what constitutes modern C++. Featuring carefully crafted examples and practical help in getting started, this revised and updated edition concisely covers most major language features and the major standard-library components needed for effective use.

This book, subtitled "Esoteric Languages That Make Programming Fun Again"starts with a dive into the underlying history of programming, covering the early computer-science concepts, like Turing machines and Turing completeness, that led to the languages we use today. Ron Kneusel then explores the realm of “atypical” programming languages, introducing you to the out-of-the-box thinking that comes from these unusual approaches to coding.