Linoleum

Developerworks are running an article on scripting with Guile, a Scheme interpreter and virtual machine.

There's a brief scheme tutorial, followed by a section on embedding scheme into C programs, and then a section on calling C functions from scheme scripts.

Developerworks are running a comprehensive series on Python version 3, and the changes that it brings with it.

Part one looks at print() - which is now a function, not a statement, and therefore requires parentheses. This, on its own, is going to cause a large number of pre-existing Python programs to break. It also covers the renaming of raw_input() to input, the new bytes literal, changes to string formatting and new I/O mechanisms.

Part two covers class decorators, metaclasses, abstract base classes, changes to exception handling and the handling of integer literals.

If you do any sort of Python programming, then you'd do well to read these two articles, as Python 3 is here now, and you're likely to be using it in the near future.

O'Reilly have published an introductory article on web programming using perl - in short, CGI.pm for newcomers.

As Perl rapidly approaches its 21st birthday, O'Reilly have published a write-up of five improvements that could be made to perl, ranging from greater frequency of releases to a light version of mod-perl.

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.