I got a great letter from a reader with a puzzle to solve, so let's dig in, shall we? Here's what he wrote: Love your column in Linux Journal. I've read it for years and learned a lot about shell scripting, but not quite enough to solve a puzzle on my own.

I must admit that I don't really follow basketball. But, I do like to engage with folks at work, and every spring I've always felt a little left out when my work colleagues fill out their NCAA March Madness basketball brackets. If your office is like mine, it seems everyone gets very excited to build their brackets and follow the basketball games and play in an office pool.

For this article, I thought it would be beneficial to go back to some basics of shell scripting and look at how functions work. Most script writers probably eschew using functions because it's a bit antithetical to how scripts tend to evolve, as a sequence of commands on the command line that are captured in a file.

Picat is a new logic-based programming language. In many ways, Picat is similar to Prolog, especially B-Prolog, but it has functions in addition to predicates, pattern-matching instead of unification in predicate heads, list comprehensions and optional destructive assignment. Knowing some Prolog helps when learning Picat but is by no means required.

The first time I heard about hash tables was after taking a compilers course during my BSc. The truth is, I was not able to understand and appreciate their usefulness fully back then. Now that I know more about hash tables, I decided to write about them so others will see their importance as well.

One of my favorite things about grade school was when the teacher would review for a test by playing Jeopardy. I'm pretty old, so my version of classroom Jeopardy was done on a chalkboard with the teacher reading answers from index cards, but the new computer-based versions I see in schools are at least as cool.

Welcome to Issue 10000000! Binary jokes are always fun, and although technically I could say "welcome to issue <BINARY_NUMBER>" every month, it's more fun with nice round numbers li

After years of making it clear that I'm not a developer in just about every article I've written here at Linux Journal, I do have a confession to make. I can write the "Hello World" equivalent in almost every programming language out there. In assembly, it might have been "1+1", but my lack of advanced skills should be evident.

A reader wrote a letter to me (oh happy day!), and although I'm still not entirely sure what she's trying to accomplish, it's an interesting puzzle to try to tackle anyway. Here's what she asked:

No, really! While on a normal day, the word "Microsoft" can be used as an antonym for "Open", the world of .NET seems to be going legitimately open source.

In my last article, we began an exploration of date math by validating a given date specified by the user, then explored how GNU date offers some slick math capabilities, but has some inherent limitations, the most notable of which is that it isn't on 100% of all Linux and UNIX systems.

Alert readers will know that I'm working on a major revision to my popular Wicked Cool Shell Scripts book to come out later this year. Although most of the scripts in this now ten-year-old book still are current and valuable, a few definitely are obsolete or have been supplanted by new technology or utilities. No worries—that's why I'm doing the update.