YAPC | talks

Randal Schwartz

Two sessions: one full day tutorial and one 90-minute talk.

Reducing Business Risk Using Perl

90 minutes

Audience: Engineers and Engineering Managers that are using (or considering using) Perl for system administration, toolsmithing, web applications, end-user applications, and/or quality assurance.

Objective: From a leading Perl expert/author/lecturer and professional technical comedian, learn how to reduce the business risk using Perl, examining how Perl compares with other tools, and how to use Perl more effectively. Includes Perl history (told from a first-person perspective), present status, and future directions, as well as advice about maintainability and security, and a few Perl jokes. Q&A, time permitting.

Learning Perl

full-day tutorial (see Stonehenge's Courses for more information) ).

This course is based on Randal's popular O'Reilly Nutshell book, Learning Perl. The course presumes no prior knowledge of Perl, and exposes the course participants to what we call the "middle two-thirds" of Perl -- those items that are needed to accomplish many common tasks, and to lay the groundwork for more advanced study on an as-needed basis.

The Learning Perl course covers:

Introduction (history, purpose, availability, support, basic concepts)
Scalar data (numbers, strings, operators, variables)
Arrays and list data (literals, variables, operators, array context)
Control structures (if, while, for, foreach)
Associative arrays (variables, conversion to lists, operators)
Basic I/O (reading, writing, formatted writing)
Regular expressions (concepts, patterns, operators)
Functions (defining, invoking, return values, arguments, local variables)
Miscellaneous control structures (loop control, expression modifiers, operators)
Filehandles and file tests (handle operations, testing files, stat operators)
Formats (defining, invoking, fields, top-of-page, select)
Directory access (changing directory, globbing, reading)
File and directory manipulation (removing, renaming, linking, modifying permissions)
Process management (backquotes, processes as filehandles, low-level process control)
Other data transformation (substrings, formatting, sorting, transliteration)
System database access (passwords, group info, binary data)
User database access (DBMs, random-access database, in-place editing)
Converting other languages to Perl (awk, sed, sh)
Overview of advanced features (references, objects, modules, etc.)

This course is not for non-programmers. Participants are expected to understand fundamental programming concepts -- for example, "What is a subroutine? What is an array?" -- and be able to edit text files. A knowledge of Unix shell scripting and/or C programming is also very helpful, but not necessary.

Randal Schwartz needs no introduction. He is the co-author of some influential O'Reilly Perl titles, including the Camel and Llama, as well as a columnist and Perl trainer at Stonehenge.com.

Kevin Lenzo

Last modified: Fri May 7 16:15:40 EDT 1999