Linoleum

GNU readline is a library that provides command-line editing facilities, such being able to browse through history with the cursor up/down keys - most Linux users would have seen this at the bash command line. It's also possible to include these features in your own Python programs, using Python's readline module. This article from O'Reilly explains how to do this, and gives a few good examples.

Andrew Murray, writing in the latest edition of Linux Gazette, examines Linux's driver initialisation mechanism.

Python 3.0 has been released.

You can get your copy here.

It's not widely known that bash has its own debugger - possibly because most Linux distributions don't install it by default. Linux.com show how to install it, and show a number of examples of using it to debug your own scripts.

Mike Tremell discusses some methods for performing column arithmetic using awk, in his Linux and Unix Menagerie weblog.

Tim Jones has written an article on the gcc extensions that are used within the Linux kernel, such as zero-length arrays (normally arrays must have at least one element defined), type discovery, ranges within switch/case blocks and prefetching.

Bojan Nikolic discusses a way to avoid memory allocation when coding in C++.

Part three of Linux Journal's look at the compilation process has been published, this time with an introduction to the make utility.