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chromatic�

chromatic is the Technical Editor of the O'Reilly Network, managing ONLamp.com, the Linux DevCenter, and Perl.com.

In his spare time, he hacks on several projects including Perl 5, Perl 6, Pugs, and Parrot. He is also the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide and the co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook.

Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10, Part 2
Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using files and strings in modern Perl. [May 7, 2008]

A Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10
Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using modern Perl productively. [Apr 23, 2008]

Memories of 20 Years of Perl
The Perl community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Perl. Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they've solved and memories they've made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language. [Dec 21, 2007]

Still More Perl Lightning Articles
Perl lightning articles are short, direct, and full of electrifying practical information. This time, Steven Philip Schubiger demonstrates how to convert crufty MakeMaker installation scripts into shiny pure-Perl installers, Phil Crow demonstrates the use of Java's powerful Swing UI toolkit from Perl, Joshua McAdams explains how to turn any module into a script, and chromatic removes duplication from test suites. [Jul 13, 2006]

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. [Jan 12, 2006]

Porting Test::Builder to Perl 6
With Pugs and Parrot playing nicely and bringing Perl 6 to the rest of us, enterprising early adopters are experimenting with porting their popular Perl 5 modules to Perl 6. O'Reilly editor chromatic recently pushed the limits of Pugs by porting Test::Builder to Perl 6. Here's what he learned about Perl 6, Pugs, and his design along the way. [Jul 28, 2005]

Inside YAPC::NA 2005
One of the success stories of the Perl community is the series of self-organized Yet Another Perl Conferences. This year's North American YAPC is in Toronto in late June. chromatic recently interviewed Richard Dice, the man behind YAPC::NA 2005 to discuss how to put together a conference and what to expect from the conference and its attendant extracurricular activities in lovely Toronto. [May 12, 2005]

People Behind Perl: brian d foy
brian d foy is a long-time Perl hacker and leader, having founded the Perl Mongers, written and helped to write many useful CPAN modules, and recently founding, publishing, and editing The Perl Review. Perl.com recently interviewed brian about his work, history, and future plans. [Apr 28, 2005]

More Lightning Articles
Yes, it's the return of Perl Lightning Articles -- short discussions of Perl and programming. This time, learn about Emacs customization with Perl, debugging without adding print statements, testing database-heavy code, and why unbuffering may be a mistake. [Mar 31, 2005]

A Plan for Pugs
Want to write actual working Perl 6 code? A month ago, it would have been difficult. What a difference February made. Autrijus Tang and a loyal cadre of Perl and Haskell people have developed an amazingly complete Perl 6 implementation in a few short weeks. chromatic recently caught up with Autrijus on #perl6 to learn more about the project. [Mar 3, 2005]

Perl Code Kata: Testing Imports
Persistently practicing good programming will make you a better programmer. It can be difficult to find small tasks to practice, though. Fear not! Here's a 30-minute exercise to improve your testing abilities and your understanding of module importing and exporting. [Dec 16, 2004]

Perl Code Kata: Testing Taint
Persistently practicing good programming will make you a better programmer. It can be difficult to find small tasks to practice, though. Fear not! Here's a 30-minute exercise to improve your testing abilities and your understanding of Perl's taint mode. [Oct 21, 2004]

A Test::MockObject Illustrated Example
Test::MockObject gives you a way to create unit tests for object-oriented programs, isolating individual object and method behavior. [Jul 10, 2002]

An Introduction to Testing
chromatic explains why writing tests is good for your code, and tells you how to go about it. [Dec 4, 2001]

DBI is OK
chromatic makes a case for using DBI and shows how it works well in the same situations as DBIx::Recordset. [Mar 20, 2001]