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Featured Articles

Selectors are the heart of jQuery and the DOM. This is an exclusive extract from Ian Elliot's book on jQuery 4.

Another puzzle featuring Joe Celko's characterful pair, Melvin Frammis, an experienced developer at International Storm Door & Software, and his junior programmer sidekick, Bugsy Cottman. This classic puzzle looks deceptively simple, but can you produce some beautiful code to solve it?

Programming News and Views

Google's Intensive Vibe Coding Course is now available on Kaggle as a self-paced Learn Guide. Originally held as a live program from June 15 - 19, 2026, all the materials can now be accessed, for free, by anyone interested in exploring the foundations, architecture, and practical development of AI agents.

Kotlin 2.4.0 has been released with improvements including stable context parameters, explicit backing fields, and multiple features for annotation use-site targets. Other updates include support for Java 26, and the enabling by default of annotations in metadata.

The Apache Ant team has released Apache Props Antlib, a library of supplemental handlers for Apache Ant properties resolution. The release follows the recent release of Ant 1.10.17.

Udacity has a new Nanodegree. Responsible AI is a 4-month program at Intermediate level that teaches you how to turn responsible AI principles into technical implementation where governance, ethics, data, and compliance are working together.  Enrol today to take advantage of a saving of 50%.

We look at a Github repository that provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide for constructing a modern Large Language Model from the ground by up using Python and PyTorch.

GitHub has made it more difficult to checkout unreviewed pull requests. The change has been made to reduce pwn requests, where attacker-controlled code execute with the workflow’s full privileges. Pwn requests have been the root cause of multiple attacks, and GitHub is keen to prevent them.

Researchers have successfully recovered all the surviving text from one of the Herculaneum Scrolls, part of a collection of papyri burnt by fire and then buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. They have also recovered the title and author-attribution of another scroll.

This week saw the publication of Programming The ESP32 RISC V in MicroPython in which Harry Fairhead and Mike James provides a deep dive into programming members of the ESP32 RISC family - the C2, C3, C5, C6 and H2 - and we have our first exclusive extract. News topics include Linux, Typescript and XCode - so something for everyone.

JNation Conference is a software development event held annually in Coimbra, Portugal, that covers various topics relevant to the software development industry.

The 2026 ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award has been has been conferred on Srinivas Devadas, a Professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for his pioneering contributions to secure architectures with broad industrial and academic impact.

Project Valhalla, the OpenJDK project designed to "explore and incubate" advanced Java VM and language feature candidates such as value types and generic specialization, is making its first appearance into OpenJDK. The news was announced on the OpenJDK mailing list.

TestSprite has released an open source command-line tool that lets AI coding agents autonomously verify their own work across both frontend and backend before declaring a task complete. To test the new tool, TestSprite ran a public competition in which AI coding agents were built and deployed while being refereed by TestSprite.

Book Watch

In this book, subtitled "Build scalable and cloud-ready web applications using modern React, TypeScript, and Docker", David Choi and Cihan Yakar explore the evolving landscape of full-stack development with the latest web technologies to build production-ready React applications and deploy them using Docker on AWS.  This edition provides a hands-on guide to mastering these technologies, with new chapters and updated content that reflects current industry practices.

This book, subtitled "A Field Guide for the Working Developer" provides a practical path through the terminology, tools, and implementation patterns that matter. Jacob Orshalick, Jerry M. Reghunadh and Danny Thompson show how to build with AI using the tools you already know: JavaScript, Python, APIs, SDKs, and databases. LLMs, RAG, LoRA, MCP, embeddings, and agents are not just intimidating buzzwords. The book shows how to use them as the building blocks for the next generation of software.

This book tells the story of the secretive decade-long Pentagon campaign to deliver America into the age of AI warfare. Katrina Manson explains how in 2017, a small crew was assembled by the Pentagon to put AI at the heart of how America makes war. Led by Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps colonel driven by the deaths of US troops and the prospect of war with an AI-equipped China, the Project Maven team raced to send AI into combat. They enlisted an initially reluctant Silicon Valley, supercharged the growth of Palantir, and sent algorithms made by Amazon, Microsoft, and others into hot wars. Maven fielded technology to identify targets at speed and scale, developed AI-infused command systems, and learned where AI fails.

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