On the first morning of OSCON (Monday, July 21), I’m giving a tutorial based on my latest book, Mastering Perl, in which I try to give people practical advice about using Perl in the real world. For the tutorial I’ve pulled out four topics:
- benchmarking and measuring performance
- writing configurable programs so users don’t have to edit code
- logging to show debugging, error, and progress information
- debugging, patching, and fixing third party code without changing the original source
For this tutorial, you only need to be comfortable using Perl modules. I’m not going to get into tricky syntax or wizardly tricks. It’s the stuff that normal people can use to make their normal applications easier to use and maintain.
This year there are other Perl tutorials too, and most that haven’t ever been offered at OSCON:
- Introduction to mod_perl 2, by Jim Brandt, Monday morning
- Perl Security by Paul Fenwick, Monday afternoon
- Test Driven Development by Josh McAdams, Monday afternoon
- Perl Worst Practices by Damian Conway, Tuesday morning
- Catalyst: 21st Century Perl web development by Matt Trout, Tuesday afternoon
When you look at the OSCON schedule, look for the little stars next to the session. These little stars, which I’ve circled in red, let me mark sessions for my personal schedule:
Too small? Look closer:
Any session that I’ve starred is highlighted:
Then I can look at all of my selections in my personal schedule (usually linked at the bottom of the page):
Don’t worry too much about the “schedule” portion of that. I was able to choose conflicting talks (such as the Python in 3 Hours talk at the same time as Mastering Perl).
