Before I posed the question here, I did the Google thing and, of course, got the same results you did. And I agree that challenges can be an important part of the learning process. What has always given me the greatest satisfaction in programming has been solving problems. But some of Ford's challenges appear to be unreasonable. One example: One script calls for input that should be a number. The challenge is to evaluate input to make sure that it is a number. My Net searches turned up a code block that does the job, but the code is a regular expression -- something that the book doesn't cover for a couple of chapters further on. (If there is a different way to check input for numerical data, I'd be happy to try it.)