Redhat went now public and everyone can buy their shares. Who would have predicted that? Yes, somehow it is a logical step but is it really still the original spirit of Linux? What's next ? LinuxFocus shares?

This month issue has again a number of interesting articles. Nerdbank is a new interesting project and it would be good if it would really take off.
Under "Software Development" and "UNIX Basics" we have this month a number of articles about scripting languages. Some of them will be continued in November.
Many people who have configured their sendmail using M4 will be happy to learn more about this macro language. This article shows how M4 can be used for "Webdesign" tasks.

The CD-rom article is meant for Linux newbies and has a lot of information that is often missing in the installation manuals of the various distributions. This is a pretty good issue and LinuxFocus will continue to publish good articles that we get from our staff and readers. Enjoy the new issue!

Community

• Nerdbank - a banking initiative for open interfaces in electronic commerce, by Holger Blasum
  Nerdbank is a project to develop an open and secure banking system for worldwide electronic money transactions.

Software Development

• Perl I, by Guido Socher
  This is the start of a series on perl. The first article is quite short and for people with no previous perl knowledge.
  
• Dialog - a programming language for dialogs, by Philipp Gühring
  This is a programming language to program dialogs in games and simulations.
  
• The Tcl Syntax, by Brent B. Welch
  This article explains basic concepts and syntax of the Tcl language.
  
  

UNIX Basics

• AWK, by Javier Palacios Bermejo
  This article shows how to write litte AWK scripts to automise things during your daily work.
  
  
• How to use your CD-ROM under Linux, by Yao Feng
  This article gives a short but useful description on how to use your CD-ROM under Linux.

Webdesign

• Building text files with m4 macros, by John Perr
  This tutorial describes how to ease the maintenance of text or HTML files, using the m4 macro processor.