Courses 2010

Once again we could win Damian Conway as instructor for courses in 2010. Damian is the author of several books about Perl and of numerous Perl modules. In addition to his work as Perl instructor and consultant he works closely together with Larry Wall on the definition of Perl 6.

The courses are being organized together with the IT services of ETH Zurich and will be held in room ML H43 of the machine laboratory next to the main building of ETH Zurich between 9 and 17h unless marked differently. The courses will be given in English.

For registration, please follow the links below each course. Please note, if you don't have an ETH account you need to first open a guest account. You'll find the relevant information on the registration pages.

NOTE: The course on Presentation Techniques on Monday is not a IT specific course, but addresses its topic in a general manner. The Regular Expression course on Thursday will also by useful for users of other programming languages, as (Perl) Regular Expressions can be used in various languages.

Advanced Technical Presentation Techniques: Monday, 25 October 2010 --- Registration
Presenting technical information to an audience is one of the hardest tasks any professional can face. Presenting effectively is not a natural talent for most people. Indeed, many technical presentations utterly fail in their primary objective -- to convey a complex idea or argument clearly and convincingly.
The best, most effective presentations capture the audience quickly, hold their interest effortlessly, educate and entertain them in equal measure, and sometimes even inspire them. This day-long tutorial explores simple and effective techniques for achieving those goals in any kind of technical presentation.
The morning sessions focus on preparation, content selection, delivery techniques, and handling questions.
The afternoon sessions will be run as a workshop. A limited number of attendees will have the opportunity to give a short presentation they have previously created (or specifically created for the class), after which we will work through it together to improve its design and delivery. Those attendees who prefer not to present during the workshop will still benefit greatly from the observations and suggestions made to other participants.
Hands-on Perl 6 with Rakudo: Tuesday/Wednesday, 26/27 October 2010 (two-day course) --- Registration
Perl 6 will be a major improvement on Perl 5 in many ways: syntactically, semantically, pragmatically, and philosophically. This full-day class surveys the 50 most important features of Perl 6, demonstrating many of the new programming techniques those features make possible. Every demonstration will use live code, executed via Rakudo.
Attendees of this course may wish to pre-install the Rakudo compiler on their own laptops, in order to experiment with the various code examples themselves during or after the class. Instructions for installing Rakudo are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo, and the installation process will also be discussed during the class.
NOTE: This course is an extended version of last year's Perl 6 class, with many changes to the language and a great deal of extra material covered in more depth.
Understanding Regular Expressions: Thursday, 28 October 2010 --- Registration
This one-day tutorial (a repetition of the course held in 2008 at ETH) will introduce beginner and intermediate Perl programmers to the full functionality of Perl's regular expressions. By lunch time, Perl's regexes will no longer seem like a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in line-noise.
Parsing with Regexp::Grammar: Friday, 29 October 2010 --- Registration
This tutorial will show you how to use a range of standard Perl 5.10 features and the new Regexp::Grammars module to decipher and process a variety of complex data and command formats. It's a practical introduction to the techniques of grammar-based recursive-descent parsing using Perl 5.10.
The Regexp::Grammars module is the successor to the Parse::RecDescent module. It offers most of the same features, with important extra capacities such as full backtracking support whilst parsing, as well as grammar inheritance (as in Perl 6).
NOTE: Attendees of this course should be familiar with simple regular expressions (see course on Thursday) and the use of Perl modules.
(Re-) Developing with Perl 6: Saturday, 30 October 2010 (8.30-12.00) --- Registration
This new class demonstrates with a lot of practical examples the development of modules in Perl 6.
NOTE: This course is a follow-up on last year's and/or this year's Perl 6 course(s). LOCATION:This course is being held in room F33.1 in the ETH main building (HG).
Perl Worst Practices: Saturday, 30 October 2010 (13.00-16.30) --- Registration
This unusual course examines a highly sophisticated (and heavily obfuscated) Perl program named SelfGOL: a transdimensional, self- aware, viral, software meta-quine (more details).
This talk explores and illustrate many important Software Engineering principles, mainly by ironic counter-example.
LOCATION:This course is being held in room F33.1 in the ETH main building (HG).

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