Programming By Stealth

In our previous episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots taught us how to create lookup tables with jq from JSON data using the `from_entries` command. Just when we have that conquered, this time he teaches us how to do the exact opposite – disassemble lookup tables. I think this was a really fun lesson because taking data apart, reassembling it the way you want and then putting it back together again is a great way to really understand what we're doing with jq...

In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots as usual works through his solution to the challenge from last time, and as usual I learn a lot more about how to use jq to solve problems. He takes a bit of a detour to explain a fun email we got from Jill of Kent in which she explained the vast number of headaches you'll run into when trying to alphabetize names no matter the language...

Bart Busschots is back to teach us how to alter arrays and dictionaries in JSON files using jq. Bart went through his challenge solution on cleaning up the Nobel Prize database and I learned a lot from it. Maybe he’d already taught all of it to us before but I sure wouldn’t have been able to put the pieces together. For the new content, we learned how to alter arrays...

In this week’s episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart continues to expand our knowledge on how to use jq to query and manipulate JSON files. We learn how to use mathematical operators on data in our JSON files along with fun functions like floor and absolute value. I even contributed some to the learning by showing examples of how `ceil` (for ceiling), `floor`, and `round` produce curiously different results when operating on negative decimal numbers...

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to use jq as a programming language. Before we get into the new stuff, Bart takes us through his solution to the challenge, and I have to say I was pretty chuffed when he said my solution to the extra credit portion was more elegant than his. To be fair, it took a buddy programming session with him for me to get the _first_ part of the challenge figured out...

In this very meaty episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to build data structures using jq with JSON files. We’re not just querying existing data, we’re rebuilding the data the way we want to see it. We learn how to build strings with interpolation, which I find is a very odd word to describe the process. It’s really like concatenation in Excel, but maybe that’s just me...

Two weeks ago, Bart Busschots and I recorded a Programming By Stealth episode covering more queries using the jq language on our JSON files. We spent so much time working through the challenges from the previous installment that we only made it halfway through his tutorial shownotes. So this week we're back with the second half of that episode, Programming By Stealth 158B...

In Programming By Stealth this week, Bart Busschots and I start off by going through the challenges from our previous installment. Remember how I said I was really digging jq and querying JSON files because at heart I’m a data nerd? Well, I failed completely at accomplishing the homework. It was not for lack of trying though - I worked about 4 hours on just the first challenge. Because of a fundamental building block that wasn’t properly in place in my brain, I was never going to succeed...

In this week’s episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues his instruction on learning more about how to use the jq language to query JSON files. We get into the thick of it as Bart teaches us three important jq concepts: filter chaining, operators, and functions. To get there we learn about the literal values in JSON and jq and how only null and false are false...

After the last episode of Programming By Stealth where Bart gave us an intro to jq and the problems it can solve, this week we start to get our feet wet by learning how to extract data from JSON files. We learn how to descend into dictionaries and arrays, and how to slice arrays. Learn how jq will output sarcasm about “Bart Busschots” if you don’t learn how to ask it for raw output...