Yep, all vector drawing applications [that are any use] have boolean operations (add, subtract, intersect, difference plus normally a few variations on these). The one the writer is talking about in Illustrator is the shape builder tool, which is very neat, abstracts away the above, lets you build up complex shapes from primitives a bit more quickly and naturally (it can both add and subtract), that specifically I'm not sure about, it's been a long time since I used Inksacape & I don't know what the feature set is currently like (or how easy plugins are to write, as if they're easy enough I'd expect something similar to that to have been written, it's a really nice feature of Illustrator).

But you can definitely do all he talks about just with boolean operations.