Sockets sound difficult but they are fairly simple.  This is an extract from our book all about the Raspberry Pi Pico in MicroPython.

The following account is based on personal experience and you can feel free to disagree with it. I can only hope that doing so illuminates your opinion about this strange and amazing thing we do with symbols that is called "programming".

Over a third of respondents to the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shared details of their salaries, revealing that average developer salaries have fallen by about  $10K USD. Another concerning finding is that only 20% are happy in their current role.

This sounds like a good idea, but is it really? The idea that the language that code is expressed in can make it better is a subtle one and this might just have escaped the DARPA bosses.

JetBrains has improved AI Assistant, its AI-powered coding tool, for inclusion in the 2024.2 updates of its complete range of IDEs. The company says version 2024.2 introduces faster and smarter code completion for Java, Kotlin, and Python, along with smarter AI chat with GPT-4o.

Google has launched a knowledge base of Android security vulnerabilities with the aim of helping developers make their Android apps more secure.

The August 2024 Edition of the TIOBE Index has been published and Python, which has now continuously occupied the top position for 15 months since June 2023, looks set to become the most popular programming language ever.

GitHub has launched a playground for developers to try AI models. GitHub Models can be used to test and compare different models.

This year's RoboCup Finals took place last month in Eindhoven where the home team Tech United consolidated its dominance in the Middle Size League by becoming World Champions for the  8th time. In the Standard Platform League, team B-Human were the winners for the 11th time and in the Humanoid League,  RoMeLa won for a 6th time with its new ARTEMIS robot.

The Overture Maps Foundation, a collaboration of companies working on interoperable open map services and products, has announced the General Availability of several of its global open maps datasets.

Many professional developers find that coding assistants save them time and increase their productivity. But what about letting learners loose with these tools. Does it really help them?

MongoDB has announced an AI Applications Program. The company describes MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP) as including reference architectures and an end-to-end technology stack that includes integrations with leading technology providers, professional services, and a unified support system.

After some years of work on its Privacy Sandbox suite of APIs, Google is keeping third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser.

Author: Dr. Mark L. Gillenson
Publisher: Wiley
Pages: 416
ISBN:978-1119907466
Audience: Database managers
Rating: 3
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

This book is aimed at people taking a one-semester course in database management as part of their larger information systems management course. As such, it deliberately sets out not to be encyclopedic but to provide a firm grounding.

This book provides a tutorial and reference for experienced programmers who want to write robust Java code for real-world applications. In this volume Cay S. Horstmann focuses on the advanced topics that a programmer needs to know including coverage of enterprise programming, networking, databases, security, internationalization, and native methods. This edition has been revised to cover the new features and enhancements in the Java 21 long-term support release.

In this book, subtitled "Defending Against Abuses, Bots and Fraud on the Internet", David Sénécal delivers a presentation of the contemporary bot threat landscape and the latest defense strategies used by leading companies to protect themselves. Readers are told how attackers think, what motivates them, how their strategies have evolved over time, and how website owners have changed their own behaviors to keep up with their adversaries.

Subtitled "How the tech industry solves fake problems, hoards idle workers, and makes doomed bets with other people's money", this book argues that the tech industry has a tendency to go crazy. Emmanuel Maggiori decodes tech’s hysteria and explains why we all pay the price for it.