Houston.pm

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.

We begin the discussion of Basic/Intermediate Perl regular expressions. After a quick refresher on the basics of regular expressions, we go a bit beyond the basics. We also discussed when regular expressions aren't the right tool for the job, readability, and tips for improving your regular expressions.

We went through the documentation and some examples of the PAR module. This module supports building Perl ARchives (like JARs, except for Perl). It also supports turning those PAR files into executables.

We discussed two basic parts of the Perl language: references and different forms of quoting. Wade covered the basics of references, including how to create and use them. We also touched on objects. Next we turned to Perl's many quoting operators, how they are used, and how they differ.

We covered several ways to test Perl scripts and modules, focusing mostly on Test::More. We also discussed an interesting technique to make a script testable as a module.

We began a rapid dive into Object Oriented programming in Perl. We started with the basics of what constitutes object oriented programming (OOP). Then, we covered how these concepts are implemented with Perl. The session should be just enough to get you started in OOP with Perl.

Wade gave a brief introduction to the Perl DBI. The DBI is Perl's new modular relational database framework. We discussed how to call the DBI for a particular RDBMS, a little SQL overview, and some of the ways to extract data with DBI.

Wade gave a quick introduction to Perl/TK. We walked through building a simple GUI and covered a few techniques for making Perl/Tk programs more maintainable.