Hash Crash Course
When I teach about hashes, I do what most Perl tutors and tutorials do: I introduce the hash as a “dictionary”: a mapping between one thing and another. The classic example, for instance, is to have a set of…
More Advancements in Perl Programming
Around Easter last year, I finished writing the second edition of Advanced Perl Programming, a task that had been four years in the making. The aim of this new edition was to reflect the way that Perl programming had…
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Lightning Articles
Simon Cozens Serendipity - it means those occasions when things come together to give you moments of inspiration. While preparing perl.com one week, I was editing an article on how to give lightning talks by Mark Fowler and at…
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Profiling Perl
Update: Perl Profiling has evolved since this article was written, please see http://www.perl.org/about/whitepapers/perl-profiling.html for the latest information. Everyone wants their Perl code to run faster. Unfortunately, without understanding why the code is taking so long to start with, it’s impossible…
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The Evolution of Perl Email Handling
I spend the vast majority of my time at a computer working with email, whether it’s working through the ones I send and receive each day, or working on my interest in analyzing, indexing, organizing, and mining email content….
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Return of Quiz of the Week
Recently, Perl trainer and former perl.com editor Mark-Jason Dominus revived his Quiz of the Week mailing list; every week, subscribers are sent a Perl task of either “regular” or “expert” level. There are no prizes, but the submitted solutions are…
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An Interview with Allison Randal
This week, perl.com has the pleasure of interviewing Allison Randal, one of the key figures in the Perl community. Allison has been active in the Perl 6 design process since its inception, and is the President of the Perl…
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Affrus: An OS X Perl IDE
When I last reviewed a Perl IDE, ActiveState’s Komodo, I was nearly convinced; the only problem was that I use Mac OS X. Now, Late Night Software, more commonly known for their AppleScript tools, have taken their Mac programming…
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Rapid Web Application Deployment with Maypole : Part 2
When we last left our intrepid web developer, he had successfully set up an online sales catalogue in 11 lines of code. Now, however, he has to move on to turning this into a sales site with a shopping…
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Rapid Web Application Deployment with Maypole
You have a database. You have a web server. You have a deadline. Whether it’s bringing up an e-commerce storefront for a new venture, implementing a new front-end to HR’s employee database, or even providing a neat way to…
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Find What You Want with Plucene
For the past few months, my former employers and I have been working on a port of the Java Lucene search engine toolkit. On the February 3rd, Plucene was released to the world, implementing almost all of the functionality…
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Introducing Mac::Glue
Thanks to the popularity of Mac OS X, the new iBook, and the PowerBook G4, it’s no longer uncool to talk about owning an Apple. Longtime Mac devotees have now been joined by longtime Unix devotees and pretty much…
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Blosxoms, Bryars and Blikis
Recently we heard from Kake Pugh about the OpenGuides project, a wiki-based collaborative city guide system; previously, we heard from Brian Ingerson about his Kwiki wiki implementation. Guides, wikis, blogs … the new fashion in software engineering at the…
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How Perl Powers the Squeezebox
Slim Devices made their name in 2001 with the SLIMP3, a networked MP3 and Internet radio player. The SLIMP3 won a five-out-of-five mouse rating in Macworld magazine, and was featured in GQ magazine and on TechTV’s The Screen Savers….
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Database Programming with Perl
An Embarrassing Confession I’d like to think that I’m a reasonably decent Perl programmer now. I’d like to think that I have a good grasp of how to solve relatively common problems in Perl. But, you know, it hasn’t…
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Power Regexps, Part II
In the previous article, we looked at some of the more intermediate features of regular expressions, including multiline matching, quoting, and interpolation. This time, we’re going to look at more-advanced features. We’ll also look at some modules that can…
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Regexp Power
Everyone knows that Perl works particularly well as a text processing language, and that it has a great many tools to help the programmer slice and dice text files. Most people know that Perl’s regular expressions are the mainstay…
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2003 Perl Conferences
The season of Perl conferences is almost upon us! In fact, the first of the YAPCs for this year is in less than a week. So I thought this would be a good time to give a tour of…
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Genomic Perl
This is a book I have been looking forward to for a long time. Back when James Tisdall had just finished his Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics, I asked him to write an article about how to get into bioinf…
