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.)

Take a look at How to check if a scalar value is numeric or string? and Need some wisdom on strings to numbers...There is just more than one way to do it .... Earlier, I got stuck trying to perform a regex to do the same too... I found the above two links useful...