I mentioned these FREE ebooks back on Programmer’s Day, but I feel that they merit their own post: GoalKicker.com has a great collection of FREE ebooks featuring programming recipes for all sorts of platforms, from Angular to Android, C to C++ to C#, Java to Kotlin, MongoDB to MySQL, Perl to PHP to Python, Ruby on Rails to React, Swift to Xamarin Forms and more!
You can download them for free here, but if you’re feeling really grateful and generous, you can buy them one or more coffees!
Once again, it’s September 13th — the 256th day of the year (on non-leap years)! As the number of values that can be expressed in a single byte, 256 means something to programmers, and as the largest power of 2 that will fit into 365, the 256th day of the year is a perfect excuse to declare it as Day of the Programmer.
Here are some things that you might find useful on this special day…
Want a free programming book? How about a whole lot of free programming books? GoalKicker.com has a series of notes for professionals for a wide array of programming languages and platforms. You can download them for free, but if you’re feeling really grateful and generous, you can buy them one or more coffees!
There’s Humble Bundle’s Python Superpowers bundle, which provides a lot of goodies for $25, including some really good Python video courses, ebooks, and a 6-month free license of PyCharm Professional Edition!
All work and no play makes Jack/Jackie a dull programmer, so why not play some programming games, like Shenzhen I/O, pictured above? Here’s a list of nine coding games that could sharpen your skills.
And finally, if you’re a new programmer or just need a Git refresher, you’ll want to check out Get Gud with Git.
Terry Cavanaugh is an indie game developer based in Monaghan, Ireland. His portfolio includes the commercial games Dicey Dungeons…
…Super Hexagon (which is super-hard)…
…and VVVVVV (which is frustrating and maddening in the best possible way):
He’s also behind some freeware gems, including At a Distance, Don’t Look Back, and Tiny Heist.
Godot Game Engine is an free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-speech game engine for developing 2D and 3D games for desktop, web, mobile, and XR platforms.
(In case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced “Go-DOH”, and the name comes from the Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot.)
You code Godot games in C, C++, C#, and their own Python-like language, GDScript.
Here’s the list of Godot Game Engine’s “pros” from gamedesigning.org:
“Let’s all learn Godot, next weekend!” wrote Terry Cavanaugh on this page. “Sometimes the word ‘game jam’ means competition, but that’s not really the vibe I’m going for here. There’s no judging, and nobody is going to win. Or, if you prefer, as they say over at Ludum Dare, your game is your prize.”
That’s the plan — he’s going to learn Godot by building a game, and he’s inviting people to come along for the ride. You can even build one as he builds one.
I think I’ll check it out. It sounds like fun, and might be a interesting way to put my recently-acquired gaming laptop through some new paces.
“Tampa is quickly turning into Florida’s tech capital,” says the August 24th article in Forbes titled Emerging Tech Cities In The U.S.. “It has been exploding in the tech industry for several years now. There are over 50 software and IT companies in Tampa.”
In order, the cities in Forbes’ list of emerging tech cities are:
When a job search starts to get frustrating, it may be that you’re making a few missteps. Find out if that’s the case at this Computer Coach workshop, 12 Things You May Be Doing Wrong in Your Job Search. Their workshops are always free, and Computer Coach are always helpful! (They’ve even helped me out.)
Quiet Professionals (whose name is derived from the sobriquet for the Green Berets) is a defense contractor based in Tampa’s Rocky Point, and they’re doing their part in Afghanistan with their OSINT (open source intelligence) dashboard to help people in Afghanistan find help and escape. You can find more in these stories:
You can also find out more on the Project Afghan Relief Fund site, and even directly help with a donation. I did, and you can too.
Here’s a Tampa Bay Business Journals story on how three of our own local coffee chains — Blind Tiger, Buddy Brew, and Kahwa, all of whose brews I enjoy regularly — are competing against the megacoffeecorps with technology.
Give them some business! You won’t just be getting great coffee; you’ll also be investing in a local business, and helping the local area more interesting and less sterile.
A little while back, I posted an article titled So many Tampa Bay mobile dev job openings, so few applicants. The situation hasn’t changed much — there are still lots of local places who are looking for mobile developers:
Want to learn Android development or sharpen you Android dev skills? Join the GDG Suncoast Meetup and keep an eye open for their Android Study Jams, which happens every Wednesday.
I’m also looking at rebooting my Programmers of Portables meetup soon — watch this space!
Last week, I pointed you to Tutorials.EU’s video tutorial, Everything You Need To Know About Retrofit in Android | Get Data from an API, which showed you how to build an app that accesses the Rick and Morty API using the Retrofit HTTP client for Android.
This week, they expand on that tutorial by showing you how to clean up the project’s architecture by refactoring it so that it uses the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architecture:
This video is the second in a series. In next week’s video, you’ll change the implementation so that it uses coroutines to perform tasks in the background.
If you want to write an Android app that interacts with the camera beyond merely taking a picture or shooting some video, you’ll want to make use of the Camera2 API, which became available at API level 21 (a.k.a. Android 5.0, a.k.a. Lollipop), which goes all the way back to late 2014.
There are a number of recently published articles and documents that you can consult if you’d like to explore Camera2:
As I mentioned in the previous article in this series, the biggest development in the latest version of Android Studio (at least as far as I’m concerned) is that Jetpack Compose is now included, and therefore official.
Jetpack Compose is Android’s declarative UI, which puts it in the same general category as iOS’ SwiftUI or Facebook’s React.
Jetpack Compose is called declarative as opposed to imperative, which is often summarized as building UIs in a “this is what it should be like” way versus a “this is how it should be created”. It’s the difference between this…
// Imperative UI (Kotlin)
// ======================
val helloButton = Button()
helloButton.text = "Hello, World!"
val layout = Layout()
layout.add(helloButton)…and this:
// Declarative UI (Kotlin)
// =======================
Layout {
Button("Hello, World!")
}The first one specifies, step by step, how to build a simple UI, while the second simply says “this is the UI I want”.
This is a brand new way to build Android UIs, and it’s expected to become the standard way. Now is you chance to get a head start, and the following links can be your first steps.
If you want to learn Jetpack Compose, start here — at developer.android.com, where they’ve got a page of links on learning the basics.
In this official tutorial direct from Android’s own creators, you’ll learn Jetpack Compose by building a screen for a chat app that features:
…and all in fewer than 100 lines of code.
You’ll want to supplement the article above with this video, which also has you writing a list-based application using Jetpack Compose.
This article introduces Jetpack Compose in small steps, starting with a “Hello, World!” app. It goes from there to introduce key concepts such as state, modifiers, and layouts. Finally, you’re introduced to the list and are shown how to use it by building a list of famous comic book superheroes.