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Featured Articles

Python is good at numbers but as well as the standard float and integer it also has Rational and Decimal. Find out what lies behind this in this extract from Programmer's Python: Everything is Data .

C# has a built-in XML documentation system that can help you create and maintain a reference document to the classes and methods used in your application. It isn't the only documentation you will need, but it's a good start.

Programming News and Views

Author: Grant Fritchey
Publisher: Apress
Pages: 784
ISBN: 979-8868818646
Print: B0FHJT2736
Kindle: B0GKX5F4YL
Audience: DBAs & SQL Devs
Rating: 4.7
Reviewer: Ian Stirk

A popular performance tuning book gets updated for SQL Server 2025, how does it fare? Ian Stirk takes and in depth look and finds it pretty good.

The July headline on the TIOBE index is "Rust Breaks into the TIOBE Index top 10" and while we have seen other languages fleeting join this elite band only to drop out again, in this instance Rust could be a long term fixture.

JetBrains has launched a new JetBrains Academy course on the Coursera platform. Titled "Full-Stack JavaScript: Build a Real-Time Chat App", the hands-on course covers building a complete real-time chat application using Node.js, Express, React, WebSockets, and Docker.

Apache Shiro 3.0 has been released. The Java security framework now requires at least JDK 17, and has improved thread safety.

RAMPART and Clarity are frameworks designed by Microsoft to evaluate the safety and security of agentic AI applications.

The June update of Visual Studio has updated the calculation for how developers pay for using GitHub Copilot to reflect the recent changes by GitHub. The update gives developers a clearer picture of how much they're spending.

This year's ACM SIGGRAPH returns to Los Angeles from July 19th to 23rd and there's a lot to look forward to as this preview video indicates. We can  also view the Real-Time Live! Trailer - a taster of what is in store at arguably the most energetic and high-stakes event of the conference.

Have fun with SunFounder Pidog, an AI-driven quadruped robot kit designed around the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. It mimics real canine behaviors through Python programming, an onboard sensor suite, and can be integrated with LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Ollama.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego are looking at ways to give old mobile phones a second life by using them for “phone cluster computing.”

The latest update to Node.js enables the Temporal API by default. It also updates the V8 JavaScript engine to 14.6, and Undici to 8.0.

Book Watch

This book is a comprehensive guide that provides practical solutions for mastering the latest features of the C++23 Standard Template Library (STL) through hands-on recipes. Beginning with new features in C++23, Bill Weinman explains the language's updated mechanics and library features, and offers insights into how they work. Unlike other books, this cookbook takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach, covering core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, through specific real-world recipes.

When you need a language model to respond accurately and quickly about a specific field of knowledge, the sprawling capacity of a LLM may hurt more than it helps. In this book Guglielmo Iozzia teaches how to build generative AI models optimized for specific fields. Perfect for cost- or hardware-constrained environments, Small Language Models (SLMs) train on domain specific data for high-quality results in specific tasks. In this book you’ll develop SLMs that can generate everything from Python code to protein structures and antibody sequences, all on commodity hardware.

In hacker circles, heavy wizardry means code that trades on intimate knowledge of a system  - the kind that speaks its private dialects and bends its rules. In this book, David Martínez Oliveira, aka Pico teaches you to write it. You'll build shellcode, backdoors, droppers, and worms from scratch, working at the instruction level where magic happens. Every project is implemented for four architectures: x86_64, ARM, MIPS, and RISC-V. You’ll write the same program four times, seeing exactly what stays constant and what changes. Each chapter starts with architecture fundamentals, such as memory layout, calling conventions, and stack mechanics, then walks through complete working implementations on Linux in safe, contained environments.

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