In recent years, JavaScript (JS) has seen a resurgence in popularity. From NodeJS on servers to PhoneGap on mobile devices to common standards in web browsers, JS seems to be everywhere. ES is the abbreviation for ECMA Script, the standard which JS implements. This book covers in detail the advance of the ES standards from earlier days (ES5) to 2019 (ESNext). Much effort has been given on the issue of “callback hell” and features resulting…
The conscientious reader should carefully heed the words of this title. The book functions as an introduction to Python that leads, step by step, to using it with Machine Learning. It takes the shortest and easiest path to get there. As such, it provides fairly immediate gratification for the reader. With such low-hanging fruit, its intended audience is beginners without a lot of knowledge in computer science. For that audience, Anis effectively communicates his message.…
Vue is a popular software programming package based off of JavaScript. It is an add-on that makes a client’s web browser to all sorts of fun and useful things. Through using templating and a centralized API, it can help create fast user interfaces on the web. It’s more-or-less a competitor with other JavaScript libraries like React. Vue functions as a templating engine in JavaScript. That means that it is a client-side templating engine (in your…
Flavio Copes, an expert on JavaScript, maintains a blog and manages courses that introduce folks to the myriad uses of this long-time staple of a computer language. React is a technology by which JS is used to create more responsive websites for users. These websites operate more quickly and do not wait as often for servers to respond. In this book, Copes first covers the advances in JavaScript over the past few years. Those who…
Brian Kernighan is most known for writing the definitive work on the C computer language. He worked for most of his career at famous Bell Labs from AT&T and worked among those who developed the UNIX operating system. UNIX powers much of the Internet and served as the basis for computer operating systems like Linux and MacOS. These all have influenced technological history, and he enlightens us as to how. He writes in a light,…
Upon reading the title of this book, many non-specialists might rightly ask, “What is bioinformatics? And why does it deserve its own history?” For the first question, bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to biological studies, and I hope that reading this review will answer the second question. Many of us were taught hypothesis-driven biology in school – that is, we were taught to ask a well-formed question, perform an experiment, and confirm/deny the…
As a society, we have quickly moved into and out of the computer age and into the age of the world wide web. We are soon moving into the age of the Internet of Things (IoT). These comprise a myriad of devices which “talk” together via computer networks. They collect mountains of data on us and are poised to revolutionize virtually every sphere of human life. Although driven by technological advance, these changes are ultimately…
In software development, technical debt is understood as something in software design that slowly reduces the speed of development. To mix metaphors, technical debt causes friction in the development process. Over time, work arounds cause “interest” to accrue on the principal of bad design. The business and software development are negatively impacted, and eventually a “tipping point” is reached. Then a plan is made to pay down some (but usually not all) of the technical…
As commonly told, science rose in the public’s consciousness during the Renaissance. However, the word “technology” in the English language was not used then. Instead, “technology” was used more and more frequently after the 1950s. What does this word exactly mean and what does it tell about our society that we use it so much today? Schatzberg, a professor in one of the premier schools of technology in the world, asks these questions with us…
This book is written by Flavio Copes, an Italian computer-science writer who maintains his own blog (linked below). He has written many blog posts in English about relevant topics of interest to software developers. He seems to have transformed many of these blog posts into books and has independently published these. Some of these books are even freely downloadable with the sole cost of signing up for a free email list. Overall, though presumably more…