Presentations for 2004

Although the focus of the presentation was benchmarking, Chuck covered other topics such as the DATA file handle and the differences between our and my variables.

As you should expect from Perl, there are several ways to process command line options. Chuck covers several methods from manual processing through several modules that provide better interfaces.

April didn't have slides as we discussed a mail conversion project and the tools used to handle problems.

The standard Perl distribution comes with a large number of goodies in the form of standard modules. Although there was not enough time to cover all of these modules in depth, Chuck did cover many of the most useful modules.

This presentation was a grab-bag of some important features of the language, including statement modifiers, loop control, regular expression options, and the map operator.

This presentation began a series on Perl and the Internet with the Template Toolkit.

We got into CGI.pm since we had covered the basics of what you could do with TT2 without using CGI, so we covered enough of CGI.pm to allow continued exploration of TT2 if desired.

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.

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.

Paul gave a short presentation on some of the interesting features of the vim editor. Unfortunately, we don't have any of the content to display, because most of the presentation showed Paul walking us through the features. Even long-time users of vim gained some ideas from this talk.

Most people are used to the concept of web servers by now. This presentation shows how easy Perl makes building one. Although any production system would use a real web server like Apache, sometimes a small single-user webserver can solve a problem. Wade demonstrated how to build a web server that serves static pages from disk and one that displays dynamic content using the HTTP::Daemon module.