| If you've not visited I Programmer before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to our news with its mix of analysis and comment and to the books we've selected for our Book Watch Archive. This week Mike James asks "Can AI Be Conscious?" and Sue Gee explores whether a Computer Science degree is still the best preparation for a career in software. To receive this digest automatically by email, sign up for our weekly newsletter. ** July 30 - August 5, 2026 **
Featured Articles
| Master The ESP32 WiFi: Sockets 04 Aug | Harry Fairhead and Mike James Sockets are the foundation of modern Internet communication. Find out how easy they are to use. This is an extract from our book that takes a deep dive into WiFi on the ESP32 in C. ASIN:B0G5M76KLB | Principles Of MP3 03 Aug | Harry Fairhead MP3 is just a file format for audio files but judging by the revolution in the way music is listened to since it was introduced you might think it was much more and in a sense it is. | |
Programming News and Views
| Can AI Be Conscious? 05 Aug | Mike James Of course not, but the reason why is more enlightening than the simple answer. Unlike intelligence, which being operational is something you can test for, consciousness is a complex idea for which no test exists. | Computer Science Enrollment In Decline 05 Aug | Sue Gee Enrollment in computer science degrees has seen a downturn after more than a decade of continuous growth. Is a Computer Science degree the best preparation for a career in software? | TypeScript 7 Released 04 Aug | Ian Elliot Microsoft has announced the general availability of TypeScript 7, the first version to have been written in native code. TypeScript 7 is about ten times faster than TypeScript 6.0, which will be the last version of the JavaScript-based version. | Learn Python For Free With Scrimba 04 Aug | Sue Gee Scrimba has just launched a free Python course for complete beginners and developers transitioning from another language. This marks a notable expansion beyond its well-established focus on the JavaScript ecosystem - but all the aspects that make Scrimba a fun, hands-on learning environment are there. | The Cybersecurity Learning Lab: 70 Hands-On Practical Projects 03 Aug | Nikos Vaggalis Introducing a comprehensive GitHub repository which hosts 70 cybersecurity projects ranging from foundational to advanced difficulty. | JetBrains Makes Kotlin LLM Open Source 03 Aug | Mike James JetBrains has announced that KotlinLLM, its research prototype for delegating runtime logic to a large language model (LLM) from Kotlin code, will now be available as open source and will be public. ASIN:B0D8H4N8SK | DeepMind Creates A Gemini Brain For Robotics 02 Aug | Sue Gee Google has released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of AI models that take us ever closer towards intelligent robots. Gemini Robotics ER2 acts as the brain for one or more robots, enabling robots to plan and to cooperate. | Robot Finger Feels Using Color 31 Jul | Lucy Black A team of researchers has demonstrated a robot finger that uses color to work out what it is touching. The robot uses a tactile sensing system based on a mechanochromic material – a material that changes color when subjected to mechanical strain. | What Happened At The Posette Event for Postgres 2026 31 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis Posette is a recurring event run by the Postgres team at Microsoft. that brings together Postgres experts, developers, users and contributors from around the globe to present all things Postgres. 2026 marks its 5th year. | GitHub Introduces Cooldown Period For Dependabot 30 Jul | Kay Ewbank GitHub has changed Dependabot to wait before issuing version updates. A new default three-day cooldown delays version update pull requests so maintainers and security researchers can address findings in a release before it gets into wider code. | Wren A I- The Generative Business Intelligence Engine 30 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis Wren AI is an open-source development framework designed to translate complex business data into trustworthy natural language answers. | |
Book Watch
| Angular Projects, 3rd Ed (Packt) In this book, subtitled "Learn Angular by building 10 real-world, enterprise web apps and projects ", Aristeidis Bampakos explores Angular's latest features, from signals and standalone components to SSR, SSG, AI tooling, and production-ready UI and data patterns. Each project reflects how real teams work: forms, routing, data, and the small choices that make an app feel finished. You will build with just enough tech to matter: signals, template-driven and reactive forms; PrimeNG, Angular Material, and Telerik UI; Google Maps; drag-and-drop; and desktop features. You will also wire up backend NestJS with MongoDB, Firebase services, and email notifications, then improve delivery with SSR and SSG and focused Core Web Vitals improvements. <ASIN:1806668475 > | Rust for C Engineers: Safe Systems Programming (FromC2Rust) In this book, Rathi Kartheek argues that for engineers working in C, moving to Rust is not just about learning a new language. It involves understanding how familiar systems-level ideas are expressed differently. Without that connection, the transition can feel unclear. This book is written for that transition. It serves as a clear and practical bridge for C and embedded engineers who want to adopt Rust while staying grounded in the principles they already know. The focus is on connecting concepts, so that Rust builds naturally on an existing systems programming mindset. <ASIN:B0GWXYK8F7 > | Mapping Knowledge Across Time (CRC Press) Subtitled "Seven Books that Visualized the World", this book asks what patterns we use to represent knowledge of the world. Opening seven books side by side, Mapping Knowledge Across Time asks these difficult questions. What shapes do we use to represent creation? What do we record and what do we ignore when we map the world? Paul Kahn takes a tour of the information design patterns from Modernist diagrams of evolution to medieval Islamic maps, from Chinese representations of rivers to Jewish diagrams of astrological cycles. Each chapter flows back and forth between centuries and cultures, interweaving cartography with data visualization, atlases with encyclopedias. <ASIN:1041392796 > | I Programmer has reported news for over 12 years. You can access I Programmer Weekly back to January 2012 for all the headlines plus the book reviews and articles. To keep up with the latest news and receive this digest automatically by email, sign up for our weekly newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn , where you are welcome to share all our stories. You can also subscribe to our RSS Feeds - we have one for Full Contents , another for News and also one for Books with details of reviews and additions to Book Watch. ** Send your programming press releases, news items or comments to ** : NewsDesk@i-programmer.info |