Perl Courses 2009

This year we will again be able to offer courses and seminars with Damian Conway as instructor. 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 H37.1 of the ML building of ETH Zurich between 9 and 17h. The courses will be given in English.

You'll find a link to the registration form shortly next to each course description.

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.

Object-oriented Perl for Perl Programmers

Thursday, 20 August 2009 --- Registration
This full-day class will show you how to build on the basic Perl constructs and techniques you already know (hashes, arrays, references, packages, and references) and discover the elegance and power of Perl's OO capabilities.
You will learn:

how Perl's object-orientation is built on top of familiar constructs like hashes, packages, and subroutines
how to convert hashes, arrays, and scalars into objects
how to add encapsulation to Perl classes
how Perl implements inheritance and polymorphism (which is quite different from other OO languages)
several easy ways to implement complete classes automatically

Perl Best Practices

Friday, 21 August 2009 --- Registration
One of the major challenges of using Perl in a development environment is that Perl's "More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy often means there are far too many choices when it comes to solving a particular problem using the language. This makes coding standards and the use of best-practice techniques especially important in Perl development.
This full-day class provides a large number of suggestions and ideas for improving the robustness, correctness, efficiency, and maintainability of your Perl code. Topics covered will include: code layout, naming conventions, core features (variables and values, operators and control structures), subroutine design, I/O problems, error handling and testing. Extra topics (such as module development and regular expressions) may also be covered if time permits.
Please note that this class is an abbreviated version of the course offered by Oetiker&Partner and ETH in 2007 (http://it.oetiker.ch/consulting/perl/2007.en.html) and selects the most important advice from that class to fit into a single day. Students who took the 2007 class will already have covered all the material offered in this class (but might be interested in it as a refresher anyway).

Advanced Perl Regexes

Monday, 24 August 2009 --- Registration
This full-day class follows on from last year's "Understanding Regexes" course and teaches the more advanced and powerful features of Perl regular expressions such as extended layout mode, code embedding, user-defined assertions, and backtracking control.
The course also covers many of the new regex features introduced in Perl 5.10, including recursive patterns, named captures, hyper-greedy quantifiers, backtracking control, relative backreferences, variable-length look-behind.
These high-end features are not covered in most Perl textbooks or classes, yet understanding and being able to apply them is essential when dealing with large, real world data sets. During the class we will work through several everyday, yet challenging, problems in information processing and see how the Perl's regular expression mechanism can be tamed and harnessed to solve them.
As a special bonus, this class will also cover -- for the first time anywhere in the world -- a new regex module (created by Damian) that adds full grammatical parsing to Perl 5.10 regular expressions.
Note that it is NOT necessary to have taken the 2008 regex class in order to take this one, but some familiarity with Perl regular expressions is essential.

Vim Scripting

Tuesday, 25 August 2009 --- Registration
The Vim editor incorporates a full programming language, with which you can reconfigure just about any aspect of its interface and functionality. This full-day tutorial explores the syntax and semantics of that scripting language including:

Values and variables
Comments and layout
Arithmetic and string manipulations
Conditionals and control structures
Lists and dictionaries (a.k.a. arrays and hash tables)
Run-time vs compile-time statements
Built-in functions
Accessing and manipulating the editor state
Issuing editor commands
User-defined functions
Scoping of variables and functions
Event-driven Vim scripting

All the language features are introduced and demonstrated via a series of practical examples, such as:

Autogenerating comment templates
Redesigning Vim's line-copy function
Context-sensitive insert-mode tab completion
Auto-aligning assignments, columns, and other text constructs
Self-adjusting tabspacing
Auto-initialization of new source code files
Comment toggling
List rewriting

If anything about the way Vim works has ever annoyed or frustrated you, you'll leave this tutorial with the knowledge and understanding required to fix, augment, replace, simplify, extend, fold, spindle, or mutilate it so it works the way you want.

Hands-on Perl 6 with Rakudo

Wednesday, 26 August 2009 --- Registration
You can write and run Perl 6 code today. Implementation of the Parrot-based Perl 6 compiler (Rakudo) is proceeding rapidly and it can already run a wide range of Perl 6 programs. Applications are already being implemented in Perl 6 and within the next 12 months the Rakudo compiler is likely to be ready for general development work.
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.
Topics covered will include:

Rationalized syntax and semantics
Changes and additions to operators
New data types: Pairs, Junctions, and Captures
New control structures
The Perl 6 (optional) type system
Pattern matching and parsing in Perl 6
Subroutines
Object oriented features
Multiparadigm support: functional, transactional, and parallel programming in Perl 6

Note that attendees 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.

Advanced Technical Presentation Techniques

Thursday, 27 August 2009 --- Registration
Presenting technical information to an audience is one of the hardest tasks any I.T. 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.

Comments of former participants.

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