Houston.pm

Robert lead a discussion on Perl 6. The meeting was part presentation, part question and answer session.

Will and Jeremy presented their experiences at YAPC::NA this year in Chicago. Jeremy also gave an update on the current state of our proposal for YAPC::NA 2007 in Houston.

Paul covered two separate topics this month. The first was a quick overview of the Subversion version control system. Afterwards, he explained the topics of caching and memoization as discussed in the book Higher Order Perl.

We concluded our discussion on Perl common knowledge, tip, and tricks. Plus, we discussed some gotchas relating to context and dubroutines.

Wade lead a discussion on common Perl features, tips, and tricks that every Perl programmer should know.

Paul concluded this series of presentations on libusb for control the USB Visual Indicator from Perl. We used the current prototype to control two separate USB VSI devices on the same laptop and solved some difficulties with Inline::C and modules.

Paul continued the group programming session using Inline::C and libusb to control the USB Visual Indicator from Perl. In this installment, we worked around discrepencies in the documents and provided a Perl-friendly interface to a low-level function. Once again, audience participation was half the fun.

Paul led a group programming session using Inline::C and libusb to control a USB-based programmable light from Perl. The device was fun, the code was interesting, and a good time was had by all.

This month, Bill presented a talk combining Perl, Graphics, programming metrics, and astronomy. He showed how easy it is to produce various charts with the GD::Graph Perl module. We saw how to convert a data set into line, bar, point, and pie charts. In the process, we also learned a bit about cataclysmic variable stars and amateur astronomy.

This month was planned as a discussion of development tools for use with Perl and a discussion of projects we are working on. These slides list a few tools that work well with Perl, including editors, an IDE, and version control tools.

One of the members had some questions about Perl program design involving a program from work. We spent about an hour discussing issues of Perl code design.

Paul discussed his program for manipulating keywords in image files, focusing on the modules Text::Query and Getopt::Long.

After a couple of months of regular expressions, we take a month off and learn how to not write regular expressions. The Regexp::Common module provides relatively easy access to a fairly large number of common regexes for your matching pleasure.

We had some extra time this month, so the members started a interesting discussion of a number of Perl related topics, including CPAN, pack and unpack, and the modules in the standard Perl distribution.

This month, we finished the discussion of Basic/Intermediate Perl regular expressions. The presentation covered some of the lesser used options and anchors, regex surprises, and some optimization considerations.