With one of the most appealing titles I've ever seen in a programming book, I could not recommend Scala for the Impatient highly enough. The author, Cay Horstmann, has written many books about Java, and here he does a great job of explaining Scala, starting at the very basics. Keeping things concise and relevant at all stages, this is a book that respects your own limited time.

Since we recently announced our $10001 Binary Battle to promote applications built on the Mendeley API (now including PLoS as well), I decided to take a look at the data to see what people have to work with.

We are happy to announce the release of Drools (Expert, Fusion, Planner, Guvnor) 5.4.0.Final. jBPM 5.3.0 announcement will follow shortly and the link will be added when it does.

The Dart team published version 0.09 of the young language’s specification last week, featuring a number of new rules. As of Saturday, abstract and interface elements may both specify default values, the ‘~/’ operator can be applied to doubles and factories may be used for abstract class instantiation.

I can see some good things in Scala, but I find the language feature rich and readability poor. The last, stupidest, most ridiculous reason to consider a new language is to decrease typing, so that‘s not a remote consideration.

Since SSHA (Salted SHA1) is now most commonly used in storing password hashes in OpenLDAP, folks who need to create accounts on this system from .NET (ex. Forefront Identity Manager FIM), may find this sample useful.