In the one-day class for intermediate Perl programmers, I’ll cover selected topics from the book and possibly from this website.

Other authors confirmed so far include:

• chromatic (Modern Perl, Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook, Perl Hacks, Extreme Programming Pocket Guide)

• brian d foy (Effective Perl Programming, Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, Mastering Perl)

• Joshua McAdams (Effective Perl Programming)

• Curtis “Ovid” Poe (Perl Hacks)

• Randal Schwartz (Programming perl (1st edition), Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, Perls of Wisdom)

• Peter Scott (Perl Medic, Perl Debugged, Perl Fundamentals (DVD))

Make sure that you’re going to Powell’s Technical Books is at 33 Northwest Park Avenue in Portland, and not one of their other Portland stores. You can take the MAX Green line (for free) from the Convention Center to NW 5th St and NW Couch St, then walk 4 blocks west to the store.

Most of the class goes back to the basics and re-learning the handful of underlying rules in Perl. These are the things that we don’t get bogged down with in Learning Perl, where we want to get as much Perl in front of people as soon as possible so they can start writing Perl programs (no matter how ugly they might look). Effective Perl Programming, however, takes that to another level as Perlers come back to think about the subtle things that they ignored while they were trying to get the big picture. Learning any language is a spiralling effort to big up the big concepts then coming back around to refine them, over and over.

I’ve started to make a list of the handful of things that Perlers need to understand, and none of it has to do with tricky syntax. Many people never pick up these concepts, so they come up with complicated models to explain why things happen. Instead, the Perler just needs to understand:

• Data and variables are different things (e.g. lists and arrays)
• Operators matter more than data for deciding what happens
• Context is important (strings and numbers; scalar, list, and void)
• Run-time versus compile time, and when things happen despite their location in the code

Josh and I will also have a box of signed copies of the book, although those might go fast during the conference (and aren’t part of the course fee). Of course, you can also buy your book in advance and have us sign it during the conference.

In the one-day class for intermediate Perl programmers, I’ll cover selected topics from the book, including:

• Working with Unicode in Perl
• Tricks with filehandles
• New regex features in Perl 5.10 and later
• Playing with pack
• Using closures to make things simpler
• and other topics as time allows

Although the book hasn’t been published yet, it is available for pre-order on Amazon, and attendees to the class can get a sneak peek at the working manuscript as well as a soft copy of the course slides.