I am coming back to go after a very long time away. I need a free program that will let me play on my computer at home so I can practice the josekis and work out problems. What would you all recommend? I do have an sgf reader already.

I would recommend playing against other people, no matter your level. For that, KGS is very good.

I don't really think studying josekis is very helpful at your level. Most of the time, just playing fundamentally sound moves will carry you much much further. If you do want to learn joseki, http://eidogo.com might be good. As for doing Go problems, which is very useful, http://goproblems.com has probably the most extensive database. If you do use that site though, I would highly recommend actually finding the solution using your head rather than just clicking where you think the right answer is. Also, http://senseis.xmp.net has a great amount of general Go knowledge.

This may not seem like a lot, but I got to ~12k with nothing more than this. It should be a good start for you.

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Thank you very much for those links. I did have one of them. Do you happen to know of any freeware/donation go playing software so I can play against the computer? I knew one but I have forgotten the name and the author.

p.s. I did find the david fotland program trial version after I posted earlier. If you know of any others though I would appreciate it.

I don't know all that much about Go bots, but there is GNUGo you can try. There are others, but someone else will have to point you to them.

(P.S. KGS also has several go-playing bots on it. Just scroll down to the bottom of the "Open Games" tab if you're interested.)

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

I remember downloading a program with a strong Gnu Go on it. Download the panda-net client, you would be able to play Go even when you are offline, against other people and the computer. The KGS client is also very good, it's an SGF editor too.

For getting re-acquainted with the game, I think programs are fine - but apparently playing against them too much will teach you bad habits...

A good all-around program, which is freeware to boot, is Drago. You can use it to play against various engines such as gnugo or mogo which can be downloaded, and also it has database functions for studying games. Another option is moyo go, which however is no longer being developed. The program I used to get into go was goknot, which also unfortunately seems to be on ice.

For doing tsumego, you could try either gogrinder or uligo.

There are a few standalone programs that just play go - igowin and leela lite, both 9x9 programs, adapt to your strength.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Maybe. That's the sort of issue that has to be revisited every six months or so to see in what ways the avaialble software may have changed. Certainly no reason to assume one year old conclusions would be valid. And that analysis would be on a program by program basis since general statements about "all programs" might not be valid with respect to some particular program.

At the present time there may be programs available that are both strong opponents and that do not play all that much differently than humans. Whether there are "free" programs like that is another matter.