[Techtalk] BASH command subsitution

[Robin Hood]

I have been working through my Unix textbook and am up to the chapter on the
Bourne shell.
I am up to the section on command subsitution.
According to my textbook typing:

$ echo the date today is 'date'

should result in something like:

the date today is Mon Feb 2 00:41:55 CST 1998

However. When I type this into my Linux box (SuSE 8.0)
All I get is:

todays date is date.

I have also tried the following:

$ echo 'ls'
ls
$ echo 'pwd'
pwd

It seems that command subsitution does not work under bash (at least on my
computer anyway).
Has anybody else ever had this problem?
Is it a bug? or am I doing something really stupid?


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