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Featured Articles

JSON is a very popular text data format, but it is based on JavaScript. Can this work with Python?  Find out what lies behind in this extract from Programmer's Python: Everything is Data .

Despite the fact that pointers have been long regarded as "dangerous" they are still deeply embedded in the way we do things. Much of the difficulty in using them stems from not understanding where they originate from. Pointers are a sophisticated abstraction that wraps some fundamentals of assembly language.

Programming News and Views

Hour Of Code has been renamed. This year and from now on it will be called "Hour Of AI", giving in to this AI-dictated era. Another indication that coding has shifted from a task of manual labor to one of automated generation. Code.org is a trend setter and crucial to kids' education relating to Computer Science, so the rebranding is highly significant.

This week in Las Vegas, Amazon has made several announcements at its annual user conference, re:Invent, including updates to AWS Transform, and the introduction of Lambda managed instances.

Google has launched a new Google Colab extension for Visual Studio Code. Colab is Google's platform for AI/ML development.

Microsoft has announced support for more languages in Aspire. The .NET part of its name has also been dropped, and there's a new website rather than just the GitHub repository.

There's a  drop-in upgrade to Vite with additional features. The developers say Vite+ is a command-line developer tool you can install from npm, just like Vite itself.

It's Advent, the time of year when we countdown the days to Christmas having fun doing daily coding challenges. Advents, in the programming sense, are events hosting programming puzzles announced every day till Christmas, aimed at a variety of skill levels.

For its Octoverse event, GitHub recorded an interview with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. From it we learn about the origins of Python and its name and its role in the age of AI.

Fundación Biodiversa in Colombia has become the first pilot of Microsoft's Project SPARROW. SPARROW, developed by Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, is an AI-powered edge computing solution designed to monitor and protect wildlife in the most remote regions of the world.

A new course, thanks to Andrew Ng and his partnership with Box, that shows how you can leverage MCP servers to offload otherwise laborious and custom-made work.

Kotlin 2.3 is available now as a release candidate. The new version adds a new checker for unused return values, and changes to context-sensitive resolution. The release candidate adds support for Java 25, and improved interop through Swift export.

Google has announced the public preview of BigQuery-managed AI functions. The three new functions let developers use generative AI for common analytical tasks directly within their SQL queries.

Book Watch

This book illustrates programming basics with variables, operators, and functions before moving on to demonstrate the creation of reusable Perl modules. Mike McGrath then shows how Perl can read and write files on your system. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) with Perl is demonstrated next to emulate real-world object properties and behaviours.

This workbook transforms Al Sweigart’s guide from a reading experience into a coding experience. Following Automate the Boring Stuff with Python chapter by chapter, this workbook will help turn concepts into muscle memory through carefully designed exercises, projects, and real Python scripts. Every concept is reinforced through carefully sequenced questions, exercises, and projects that help you think like a programmer and prove to yourself that you really get it.

Subtitled "Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip", this book explains how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for AI hardware. Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Stephen Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its single-minded and ferocious leader, now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.

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