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Hello, camel fans. (That's a metaphor; don't worry.) This
is the Perl
newsletter, a biweekly message that's been sent out on time
for two
mailings in a row now! Twice a month it brings you the news
you might
have missed and articles you've just agreed to read and pass
on to all of
your friends by reading the end of this sentence.
* Perl News in Brief
Perl 5.8.x pumpking Nicholas Clark has delivered the first
release
candidate of Perl 5.8.8. If you know how to compile your
own Perl, please
download the tarball, test it, and perhaps your favorite
modules against
it. Then report any bugs you find:
<h
ttp://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.8-RC1/>
The Australian and New Zealand Perl Portal launched. The
site features
articles and intends to improve communication between Perl
user groups,
businesses, developers, and organizations. It's OK if
you're not from
either island, really:
<http://perl.net.au/>
Mark Leighton Fisher resurrected Tom Christiansen's pmtools:
<http://use.perl.org/~Mark%20Leighton%20Fisher/jou
rnal/28339>
David Golden posted his slides from research on inside out
objects:
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/18/2149232>
Josh McAdams and Perlcast interviewed brian d foy again
about the Winter
2005 issue of The Perl Review:
<http://www.perlcast.com/audio/Perlcast_Interview
_018_foy.mp3>
(Be sure to read the magazine for an article by your
editor.)
* Perl.com Articles
You just learned regular expressions. You have the hang of
references and
dereferencing. Perl 5 OO makes sense.
What's this talk about Perl 6? Why are things changing?
Who had the
brilliant idea to change the string concatenation operator
or the
dereferencing arrow anyway?
Your editor suggests his "What Is Perl 6?" might
explain some of the
motivations for changes. Even if it doesn't, it gives more
places to look
for updated information, which is good in itself.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.
html>
Are there any PostgreSQL hackers around? (If you've ever
been to a PDX.pm
meeting, you know the answer is "yes!") If you're
sick of writing stored
procedures and functions in languages that aren't Perl,
check out Andrew
Dunstan's "More Perl in PostgreSQL." This week,
he shows how to store and
retrieve data with Perl--on the database side:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/p
ub/a/databases/2006/01/19/more-perl-in-postgresql.html>
Finally, when was the last time your professor was cool
enough to use Perl
to grade your assignment? If you're learning HTML from
Kendrew Lau, the
answer might be "just last week." Here's how Perl
and HTML parsing
modules make marking up student creative assignments much,
much easier:
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/19/analyzing_html.
html>
* The Conclusion
You have your assignments. Test Perl 5.8.8 to be and tell
all your
friends to read the cool articles on Perl.com. As a reward
for that,
we'll publish a new article by the inimitable Simon Cozens
next week.
Now go and do good,
- c
chromatic oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual: Page Layout 101
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Controlling a page's layout remains one of a web designer's
greatest
challenges. Fortunately, Dreamweaver provides the tools for
creating any
number of designs. In Chapter 7 of Dreamweaver 8: The
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If you like this chapter, read the whole book (and up to
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*** Featured Articles ***
Analyzing HTML with Perl
Kendrew Lau taught HTML development to business students.
Grading web
pages by hand was tedious--but Perl came to the rescue.
Here's how Perl
and HTML parsing modules helped make teaching fun again.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/19/analyzing_html.
html>
***
What is Perl 6?
Perl 6 is the long-awaited rewrite of the venerable Perl
programming
language. What's the status? What's changing? What's staying
the same? Why
does Perl need a rewrite anyway? chromatic attempts to
answer all of these
questions.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.
html>
***
Lexing Your Data
Perl is famous for its text-processing capabilities.
However, sometimes
the data you want to process is too complicated for regular
expressions
and you reach for a parser for HTML, RTF, or other common
format. What
happens you don't have a pre-defined parser, but the text
you need to work
with is too complicated for regular expressions? Curtis Poe
shows how to
do proper lexing with Perl.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/05/parsing.html>
***
A Timely Start
A well-written Perl program should, in theory, beat a shell
script, right?
In theory. In practice, sometimes the details of your Perl
installation
have more to do with why your program is slow than you might
believe.
Jean-Louis Leroy recently tracked down a bottleneck and
wrote up his
experiences with making Perl programs start faster.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/12/21/a_timely_start.
html>
***
Logic Programming with Perl and Prolog
Perl isn't the last, best programming language you'll ever
use for every
task. (Perl itself is a C program, you know.) Sometimes
other languages do
things better. Take logic programming--Prolog handles
relationships and
rules amazingly well, if you take the time to learn it.
Robert Pratte
shows how to take advantage of this from Perl.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/12/15/perl_prolog.html&g
t;
***
Testing Files and Test Modules
Perl hackers work with files all day long, creating,
renaming, updating,
editing, and munging them. Do you know your
file-manipulation code works,
though? That's why Phil Crow wrote Test::Files--to gain
confidence and
practice good coding. Here's how it works and how he tested
a test
module.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/12/08/test_files.html>
***
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