Houston.pm

We begin the discussion of Basic/Intermediate Perl regular expressions. After a quick refresher on the basics of regular expressions, we go a bit beyond the basics. We also discussed when regular expressions aren't the right tool for the job, readability, and tips for improving your regular expressions.

We went through the documentation and some examples of the PAR module. This module supports building Perl ARchives (like JARs, except for Perl). It also supports turning those PAR files into executables.

We discussed two basic parts of the Perl language: references and different forms of quoting. Wade covered the basics of references, including how to create and use them. We also touched on objects. Next we turned to Perl's many quoting operators, how they are used, and how they differ.

We covered several ways to test Perl scripts and modules, focusing mostly on Test::More. We also discussed an interesting technique to make a script testable as a module.

We began a rapid dive into Object Oriented programming in Perl. We started with the basics of what constitutes object oriented programming (OOP). Then, we covered how these concepts are implemented with Perl. The session should be just enough to get you started in OOP with Perl.

Wade gave a brief introduction to the Perl DBI. The DBI is Perl's new modular relational database framework. We discussed how to call the DBI for a particular RDBMS, a little SQL overview, and some of the ways to extract data with DBI.

Wade gave a quick introduction to Perl/TK. We walked through building a simple GUI and covered a few techniques for making Perl/Tk programs more maintainable.

We got into CGI.pm since we had covered the basics of what you could do with TT2 without using CGI, so we covered enough of CGI.pm to allow continued exploration of TT2 if desired.

This presentation began a series on Perl and the Internet with the Template Toolkit.

This presentation was a grab-bag of some important features of the language, including statement modifiers, loop control, regular expression options, and the map operator.

The standard Perl distribution comes with a large number of goodies in the form of standard modules. Although there was not enough time to cover all of these modules in depth, Chuck did cover many of the most useful modules.

April didn't have slides as we discussed a mail conversion project and the tools used to handle problems.

As you should expect from Perl, there are several ways to process command line options. Chuck covers several methods from manual processing through several modules that provide better interfaces.