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Featured Articles

Keeping track of tasks can be tough but using semaphores it can be easey. Find out how to wait for the first to finish and more. This is an extract from our latest book on the ESP in C.

It is difficult to imagine the modern world without the Internet. But look back over 50 years and you'll find that the Internet as we know it today was born out of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR.

Programming News and Views

For the second time in three years, C# has been awarded the accolade TIOBE Programming Language of the Year by virtue of have achieved the largest year-on-year increase in its ranking on the TIOBE Index.

The judges may keep telling the walled gardeners that they have to free things up and throw a few doors open, but they in turn keep finding ways to keep their walls as high as they can get away with.

Coursera is running a  global New Year promotion offering 50% discount on Cousera Plus for new subscribers. For small businesses in the US and Europe there's is a similar 50% discount for "Coursera for Teams". So what better time to discover the latest certifications to boost your resume.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced the release of Kubernetes 1.35, with improvements including vertical scaling via in-place pod resize. Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services.

HuggingFace just made the process of fine-tuning open source LLMs much easier through the use of Skills.

A high-severity vulnerability affecting MongoDB Server that was identified last month is now being actively exploited, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

If you haven't already watched it, The Thinking Game is a fascinating and inspirational video. It tells the inside story of how Deep Mind, led by Demis Hassabis, produced AlphaFold and what this breakthrough in AI means for the future.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan have created what they say are the world's smallest fully programmable, autonomous robots: microscopic swimming machines that can independently sense and respond to their surroundings, operate for months and cost just a penny each.

PostGIS Day is a chance to learn how others are making use of PostGIS and exchange ideas to make the best out of it.

Apache Beam, the open source programming SDK for defining batch and streaming data-parallel processing pipelines, is now available in a new version. Apache Beam 2.70 has been released with improved support for FLink and Python.

The online learn-to-code platform, Scrimba, is running an end of year campaign until January 4th offering a 30% discount on its Scrimba Pro Annual plan for new subscribers.

Book Watch

This book explores ways to use Postgres for areas such as geospatial systems, time series, full-text search, JSON documents, AI vector embeddings, and other specialty database functions. Denis Magda covers recipes for using Postgres in applications normally reserved for single-purpose databases. Along the way, Magda also introduces the ecosystem of Postgres extensions like pgvector, PostGIS, pgmq, and TimescaleDB.

This book is a comprehensive, beginner-friendly guide to R, the world’s most popular programming language for statistical analysis. Tilman M. Davies starts with the basics, like how to handle data and write simple programs, before moving on to more advanced topics, like producing statistical summaries of your data and performing tests and modeling. Later chapters show how to create impressive data visualizations with R’s graphics tools and contributed packages, like ggplot2, ggvis, and rgl.

In this informative, exciting, and whimsical oversized full-color hardcover volume chronicling thirty years of the fantasy strategy franchise, Heroes of Might and Magic, Neal Hallford takes fans of fantasy, turn-based strategy, and nostalgic gaming on an expansive expedition down the heroes’ path and beyond. Readers can learn the secrets behind the development of each main game in the strategy series through never-before seen art, documentation, and interviews with key members of the creative teams.

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