The last few months, we've been building a complex shell script to play elements of the game of Cribbage, demonstrating a variety of concepts and techniques as we proceed. That's all good, and last month, the script expanded to include a "shuffle" capability and the ability to deal out six cards, a typical two-player starting hand.

In an earlier article ("GNU Awk 4.0: Teaching an Old Bird Some New Tricks", published in the September 2011 issue of Linux Journal), I gave a brief history of awk and gawk and provided a high-level overview of the many new features in gawk 4.0.

Sublime Text is a proprietary, cross-platform text editor designed for people who spend huge amounts of time shuffling code around. A programmer's editor, Sublime Text is a third option to the long-standing "Vi or Emacs" conundrum. Going beyond the basics of syntax highlighting and code folding, Sublime offers a litany of innovative and unique features.

When most people think about a company's reusable assets, source code doesn't usually show up on the list, even though millions of dollars are spent every year on creating and maintaining code. Most large companies are managing hundreds of millions of lines of code—the majority of which was purpose-built to solve a specific application problem.

How'd Ya Do That? I tend to read science fiction or fantasy for entertainment and/or escape from reality.

From my perspective, one of the best parts of being a Web developer is the instant gratification. You write some code, and within minutes, it can be used by people around the world, all accessing your server via a Web browser.

Because the August issue's theme is programming, I thought I should cover some of the more-advanced features available in OpenMP.

Building a Better Mouse (and Keyboard) Trap I've mentioned in years past that my programming skills started with Pascal and ended with bubble sorting.

“Rewire your Brain”.

In many cases, scientific research takes you into totally new areas of knowledge, never before explored by others. This means the computational work you need to do may be totally new as well. Although typically such code development still happens in C or FORTRAN, Python is growing in popularity. This is especially true in physics.

Creed of Python Developers Pythonistas are eager to extol the lovely virtues of our language. Most beginning Python programmers are invited to run import this from the interpreter right after the canonical hello world. One of the favorite quips from running that command is:

JavaScript has had a long-standing monopoly on client-side Web programming. It has a tremendously large user base, and countless libraries have been written in it. Surely it is the perfect language with no flaws at all! Unfortunately, that is simply not the case.

Previously, I erroneously titled my column as "SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis". It turned out that by the time I'd finished writing it, I had spent a lot of time talking about SIGALRM and how to set up timers to avoid scripts that hang forever, but I never actually got to the topic of stdin analysis.

I received an interesting message from Angela Kahealani with a challenge: "Here's what I'd like to see in Work the Shell: a full-blown shell script template. It should comply with all standards applicable to CLI programs.

Many of my previous articles have looked at software packages that do scientific calculations and generate scientific results. But, columns of numbers are nearly impossible to make sense of—at least, by regular human beings. So what can you do? The answer is visualization.

Are you a Python programmer who wishes your storage could do more for you? Here's an easy way to add functionality to a real distributed filesystem, in your favorite language.

For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged.

Many programming languages include libraries to do more complicated math. You can do statistics, numerical analysis or handle big numbers. One topic many programming languages have difficulty with is symbolic math. If you use Python though, you have access to sympy, the symbolic math library.

As with many of the challenges we tackle, the latest project has sprawled across more articles than I ever expected when I first received the query from a reader. The question seems reasonably simple: given a month, day number and day of the week, calculate the most recent year that matches those criteria.