What Every Perl Programmer Should Know: tips, tricks, and common knowledge, part 2

For the May meeting, G. Wade Johnson lead the conclusion of the two-part discussion entitled What Every Perl Programmer Should Know: tips, tricks, and common knowledge. The idea from the presentation came from a book for another language I read called C++ Common Knowledge. That book got started a chain of thought about what we as Perl programmers should all know.

Like the previous meeting, we kept more to a discussion format than a pure presentation. We continued using the TiddlyWiki used last time to store and organize the material used in the presentation. Just like in April, we extended the document based on the discussions triggered by comments and questions from the audience. There was enough additional information generated this time around, that the document needed some serious reorganization.

The resulting presentation is available on the attached page. Instead of having two version of the document online, the document from last month has been extended with the new information.

As the session wound down, we ended up discussing two topics that don't really fall into the common knowledge theme: debugging and version control.

The debugging question concerned alternatives to print statements for debugging CGI scripts. The ability to run CGI.pm-based CGI scripts from the command line was discussed slightly. We also talked about using the built-in Perl debugger and the Devel::ptkdb module that provides a gui front-end to the debugger.

The question of version control came up, with some people commenting that they tend to just make backup copies for small projects. Wade recommended looking seriously at Subversion for any level of development.