there was lots of Perl meta discussion last tuesday, and even talk of
getting a user group together. throwing this out as a discussion
starter/reminder; us crazy perl guys can be forgetful at times.
I really don't know Perl (hopefully you'll forgive me for that), but
if there ever were a Perl-related class or meetup or anything, I'd
probably attend. It's the sort of language that I feel I should know
since I'm always writing jumbled conglomerations of bash, cat, uniq,
sort, sed, awk, egrep, find, tee, and commandline pipes, generally
forgetting the nuances of each little component.
A lot of our automated scripts (command line installers, build scripts, etc) that I maintain at work are written in perl, so I could be interested in hanging out a perl meetup (just to toss my hat into the ring)
Cinci2600 is the first friday of the month at 7p and i am partial to fridays because i work nights the first half of the week. If we can firm up the day and time i will cross post the announcement on the cinci2600 mailing list and website.
The reason I thought Friday would be good is so people from out of town could possibly make it once it gets listed on Perl Mongers. But Monday, Wednesday or some Thursdayās would work also for me. How would Wednesday February 15th work for everyone for a kickoff meeting?
Hodapp, it sounds like you are a natural fit for Perl and would pick it up very quickly.
Letās make it 7pm, Wednesday, February 15th at the hive Lounge.
We now have a Cincinnati Perl Mongers group and they provide a mailing list so Iāll send that out when I get it set up. The former organizer of Cincinnati Perl Mongers is talking about coming and bringing a few coworker Perl hackers. If things work out Iāll ask him to co-organize at his location, maybe alternating meetings with ours.
I was thinking to start off we could have a few folks present short beginner level talks to give the people who are not familiar with Perl an idea of what itās about and to let the presenters get warmed up to presenting. That could be the first hour or so and then some general discussion, networking, etc. This could be the Hive13 kickoff for the Cincinnati Perl Mongers to get ready for a public kickoff in March after people have a chance to find us.
Ideas for presentation topics:
why Perl is cool, what it is well suited for
use warnings; use strict;
what they do.
subs, vars, refs
scalars, arrays, hashes, references
intro to Perl regex
intro to CPAN
favorite modules
the origins of Perl, Perl now.
write once read never? obfuscation, golf
writing readable Perl.
write once read never? obfuscation, golf
writing readable Perl.
i am all about the readable perl.
perl critic, Perl best practices.
i can bring all my o'reilly perl books along if people want to page
through em. PBP is a must have; the base perl cookbook is also quite
a good one to have at hand. (its the only tech book on the shelf that
is visibly worn)
perldsc, Perl data structures cookbook
oo, haven't seen this one yet.
other (not beginner) topics of interest for down the road:
dealing with Unicode.
lambda expressions / result chaining. see schwartzian transform.
CGI.pm, for when you just need to get the job done.
PSGI/uwSGI, for when you outgrow pure CGI.
mod_perl? if there is interest. i used to be a big fan of
mod_perl, but now have settled on nginx / uwsgi whenever a base CGI
setup doesnt cut it.
performance optimization / data structure and algorithms analysis.
interfacing with external systems, aka: trials and tribulations of SOAP::Lite
extending/embedding, for when the built ins just cant cut it anymore.
DBI to external database, and how to use SQLite to churn through
larger working sets.
My most worn Perl book is āPerl by Exampleā by Ellie Quigley. It came with a cdrom with perl and sample source code that was a big help when learning the language.
Brent, you should create an account on www.hive13.org and make a blog posting about it. Also if you want I can grant your hive13.org account access to update the hive13 events calendar or I can do it for you. Is this event every Weds or the 3rd weds of the month? Iām not sure what the final verdict was.
Another topic for total Perl newcomers might be how to get it
installed on your platform of choice, select an editor and configure
an environment to run the code you generate. I'm sure most people
have already done this, but it wouldn't hurt to at least consider.
Also, are we planning on trying to archive any of these presentations
somewhere?
Marc,
That is a great idea. I would like to get epic setup for Perl like you were telling me about.
I hadnāt thought about archiving anything but that sounds like a good idea also. We could add them as pages to the pm.org site or set up a blog somewhere. Iāll check on how much space pm.org will let us use.