Houston.pm

Will presented an introduction to Perl for complete beginners, assuming no prior knowledge of Perl.

This month, Robert covered the FUSE filesystem. This tool allows Unix-based OSes to do specialized filesystems without doing kernel coding.

This month, Wade discussed error handling in general and exceptions in particular. The talk focused on the trade-offs of using exceptions and argued for having this technique in your bag-of-tricks.

At the end of the month, Todd was scheduled to give a presentation at YAPC::NA 2009. He offered to give the group a preview of this presentation for the June meeting.

In this month's presentation, G. Wade Johnson describes the SVG graphics format and techniques for generating SVG from Perl.

Todd lead a discussion of the MVC paradigm as related to the Catalyst web framework. The discussion ranged from MVC to other topics in object oriented programming. The discussion finished up with some thoughts on Moose Roles.

This month's topic was not directly related to Perl. G. Wade Johnson described some of the tips and traps involved with using the RRDtool software.

The topic this month was programming editors and IDEs for use with Perl. Given the time required to become really proficient with one of these tools, it is almost impossible for one person to provide a fair treatment of more than one. To handle this problem, four of our members presented aspects of different editors. The focus was mainly on emacs, Eclipse, and vim, with other editors mentioned along the way.

This session was another open invitation for people to bring questions or problems for the group to provide help on.

We discussed how much each of us had accomplished in testing Rakudo. We also discussed problems that were causing problems for members of the group.

Todd Rinaldo got Patrick Michaud (Perl 6 Pumpking) on the speaker phone for a presentation about improving the specifications testing on Rakudo.

The Emacs editor is popular with a large community of users. This month, Will showed how Emacs can improve the life of a Perl programmer. He went on to cover the screen program from the GNU project.

This session was another open invitation for people to bring questions or problems for the group to provide help on.