Using More Perl in PostgreSQL
Perl's DBI module makes it easy to use a database. That's not the only way to interact with a database, though. If your PostgreSQL database doesn't do exactly what you want, you can write server-side extensions--in Perl. Andrew Dunstan shows how to enable PL/Perl and how to store and retrieve database data with it.
[Databases]
Perl6 Summary for January 24, 2006
Perl 6 Summary for January 24, 2006
[Perl 6 Summaries]
 Linux/Unix
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Perl 5 Summary for 9-15 January 2006
Perl 5 Summary for 9-15 January 2006
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
What is Perl 6?
Perl 6 is the long-awaited rewrite of the venerable Perl programming language. What's the status? What's changing? What's staying the same? Why does Perl need a rewrite anyway? chromatic attempts to answer all of these questions.
[Perl.com]
Testing C with Libtap
Regression and unit tests are your first line of defense against bugs, bad design, and silly mistakes. Unfortunately, C programmers rarely use the good testing tools of other languages--but now there's libtap. Stig Brautaset explains how to test your C code using libtap and the wonderful Perl testing tools.
[ONLamp]
Perl 6 Summary for January 01, 2006
Perl 6 Summary for January 01, 2006
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for January 11, 2006
Perl 6 Summary for January 11, 2006
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Lexing Your Data
Perl is famous for its text-processing capabilities. However, sometimes the data you want to process is too complicated for regular expressions and you reach for a parser for HTML, RTF, or other common format. What happens you don't have a pre-defined parser, but the text you need to work with is too complicated for regular expressions? Curtis Poe shows how to do proper lexing with Perl.
[Perl.com]
A Timely Start
A well-written Perl program should, in theory, beat a shell script, right? In theory. In practice, sometimes the details of your Perl installation have more to do with why your program is slow than you might believe. Jean-Louis Leroy recently tracked down a bottleneck and wrote up his experiences with making Perl programs start faster.
[Perl.com]
Logic Programming with Perl and Prolog
Perl isn't the last, best programming language you'll ever use for every task. (Perl itself is a C program, you know.) Sometimes other languages do things better. Take logic programming--Prolog handles relationships and rules amazingly well, if you take the time to learn it. Robert Pratte shows how to take advantage of this from Perl.
[Perl.com]
Perl 5 Summary for 2-8 January 2006
Perl 5 Summary for 2-8 January 2006
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 5 Summary for 26 December 2005 - 1 January 2006
Perl 5 Summary for 26 December 2005 - 1 January 2006
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Testing Files and Test Modules
Perl hackers work with files all day long, creating, renaming, updating, editing, and munging them. Do you know your file-manipulation code works, though? That's why Phil Crow wrote Test::Files--to gain confidence and practice good coding. Here's how it works and how he tested a test module.
[Perl.com]
Perl 5 Summary for 12-25 December 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 12-25 December 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for December 18, 2005
Perl 6 Summary for December 18, 2005
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl Success Story: Client-Side Collection and Reporting
Perl's a great server-side programming language. It's also good for developers and administrators. Where are the client-side uses? Recently, Jiann Wang and Hitachi GST had to solve a thorny software licensing reporting problem. They used Perl--distributing a small client program to each desktop--and solved their problem quickly, effectively, and elegantly. Here's how.
[Perl.com]
Perl 6 Summary for December 12, 2005
Perl 6 Summary for December 12, 2005
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl 5 Summary for 5-11 December 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 5-11 December 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for December 04, 2005
Perl 6 Summary for December 04, 2005
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Document Modeling with Bricolage
Any document-processing application needs to make a model of the documents it expects to process. This can be a time-consuming and error-prone task, especially if you've never done it before. David Wheeler of the Bricolage project shows how to analyze and model documents for his publishing system. Perhaps it can help you.
[Perl.com]
Building E-Commerce Sites with Handel
Building web sites can be tedious--so many parts and pieces are all the same. Have you written enough form processors and shopping carts to last the rest of your life? Now you can get on with the real programming. Christopher H. Laco shows how to use Handel and Catalyst to build a working e-commerce site without actually writing any code.
[Perl.com]
Perl 5 Summary for 28 November-4 December 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 28 November-4 December 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for November 27, 2005
Perl 6 Summary for November 27, 2005
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Using Perl in PostgreSQL
Perl's DBI module makes it easy to use a database. That's not the only way to interact with a database, though. If your PostgreSQL database doesn't do exactly what you want, you can write server-side extensions--in Perl. Andrew Dunstan shows how to enable PL/Perl and how to write triggers with it.
[Databases]
Making Sense of Subroutines
Subroutines are the building blocks of programs. Yet too many programmers use them ineffectively, whether not making enough of them, naming them poorly, combining too many concepts into one, or any of a dozen other problems. Used properly, they can make your programs shorter, faster, and more maintainable. Rob Kinyon shows the benefits and advanced uses that come from revisiting the basics of subroutines in Perl.
[Perl.com]
Perl 5 Summary for 21-27 November 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 21-27 November 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for November 13, 2005
Perl 6 Summary for November 13, 2005
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for November 21, 2005
Perl 6 Summary for November 21, 2005
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Data Munging for Non-Programming Biologists
Scientists often have plenty of data to munge. Non-programmer scientists often have to beg their coders for help or get by doing it themselves. Amir Karger and his colleagues had a different idea. Why not provide them with short, interchangeable Perl recipes to solve small pieces of larger problems? Here's how they built the Scriptome.
[Perl.com]
Perl 5 Summary for 11-20 November 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 11-20 November 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 5 Summary for 31 October-6 November 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 31 October-6 November 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for October 25, 2005
Perl 6 Summary for October 25, 2005
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Making Menus with wxPerl
Perl's a great general-purpose programming language. wxWidgets is a powerful GUI toolkit that manages attractive, native widgets on multiple platforms. wxPerl is the combination, and it's easy to use, once you understand a few idioms. Roberto Alamos shows off everything you need to know to manage menus with wxPerl.
[Perl.com]
Distributing the Future: Beta Broadcast 003: Good and Evil
This week, O'Reilly's audio magazine program Distributing the Future takes a look at good and evil. Tim O'Reilly examines the good coming up in Web 2.0; David Smith and Peter Saint-Andrew work on helping you tell who's good and who's evil on the web; Ian Langworth and chromatic help to make Perl development better for everyone by pushing testing; Danny O'Brien shares what he's done to stop evil and encourage good; and Max Goff brings his law of medians. (25 minutes, 3 seconds)
[O'Reilly Network]
The State of the Onion 9
In Larry Wall's ninth annual State of the Onion address, he explains Perl 6's Five Year Plan, how Perl programmers are like spies (or vice versa), and how open source can learn from the intelligence community.
[Perl.com]
Perl 5 Summary for 3-9 October 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 3-9 October 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl Internationalization and Haskell: An Interview with Autrijus Tang
Edd Dumbill interviews Perl and Pugs hacker Autrijus Tang about internationalization, localization, and why he started writing an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell. Autrijus is a featured speaker at the upcoming EuroOSCON.
[Perl.com]
Perl 6 Summary for October 02, 2005
Matt Fowles has the latest from the Perl 6 mailing lists.
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl 5 Summary for 26 September-2 October 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 26 September-2 October 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl Needs Better Tools
Perl is a fantastic language for getting your work done. It's flexible, forgiving, malleable, and dynamic. Why shouldn't it have good, powerful tools? Are Perl development tools behind those of other, perhaps less-capable languages? J. Matisse Enzer argues that Perl needs better tools, and explains what those tools should do.
[Perl.com]
Perl 6 Summary for September 25, 2005
Piers Cawley has the latest on Perl 6 development, with p6i wrangling bugs and loading libraries, p6l stringifying, numifiying, and booleanifying everything in sight, and Luke Palmer summarizing cabal meetings.
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl 5 Summary for 19-25 September 2005
Perl 5 Porters Summary for 19-25 September 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl 6 Summary for September 11, 2005
Piers Cawley has the latest from the Perl 6 lists, with the Perl 6 and Parrot and Pirate results from Google's Summer of Code sponsorships bringing good news to waiting porters.
[Perl 6 Summaries]
This Week in Perl 6, August 17-23, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i seeing the most HLL discussion yet; p6l debating binding, parameters, and primitives; and p6c appreciating pretty graphics.
[Perl.com]
Using Qpsmtpd
While email is increasingly a worker's most important communication medium, the onslaught of attacks from spam, viruses, and other malicious email content is ever increasing. By implementing a mail server in Perl, you can use your favorite language to mitigate those attacks and provide greater flexibility in processing incoming mail. Matt Sergeant shows how to install, configure, and write plugins for Qpsmtpd.
[Sysadmin]
Parsing iCal Data
Perl's suitability as a glue language allows you to connect two applications that wouldn't normally communicate by translating their data files between formats. It's especially nice when these are open file formats. Robert Pratte shows how to parse iCal data files--as used in Apple's iCalendar program--and visualize them using the open source Dot graphic package.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, Through August 14, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with containers and metamodels on the Perl 6 compiler list, metamodel and trait questions on the Perl 6 language list, and opcode changes and test modules on the Perl 6 internals list.
[Perl.com]
Automated GUI Testing
Automation is the friend of testing. If you can drive your program with a script, you can test it. How does that work with GUIs, though? In the Windows world, one solution is the Win32::GuiTest module. George Nistorica demonstrates how to use it.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, August 2-9, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i seeing build and platform patches, p6l exploring meta-meta discussions, and p6c enjoying Pugs and PxPerl releases.
[Perl.com]
Building a 3D Engine in Perl, Part 4
The ultimate goal of all programming is to be as unproductive as possible--to write games. In part four of a series on building a 3D engine with Perl, Geoff Broadwell explains how to profile your engine, how to improve performance and code with display lists, and how to render text.
[Perl.com]
Important Notice for Perl.com Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds
O'Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. Here's information to help you update your existing RSS and Atom feeds to O'Reilly content.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, through August 2, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with PIL discussion on the Perl 6 compiler list, type and container questions on the Perl 6 language list, and a Lua compiler on the Perl 6 internals list.
[Perl.com]
Using Perl to Manage Plist Files, Part 2
Part 2 goes into much more detail on managing Plist files. You'll change some values and save the altered Plist file back to disk. Then you'll loop over entries in a Plist file, get a dump of the NetInfo database, and print all the users in the database using Perl foreach loops. To do that you'll convert the Cocoa dictionaries and arrays to Perl hashes and arrays. Finally, you'll create a Plist file from scratch, build the sample Xgrid cal job listed in the Xgrid man page by creating the structure using Perl hashes and arrays, and then convert them to Cocoa equivalents.
[MacDevCenter.com]
Porting Test::Builder to Perl 6
With Pugs and Parrot playing nicely and bringing Perl 6 to the rest of us, enterprising early adopters are experimenting with porting their popular Perl 5 modules to Perl 6. O'Reilly editor chromatic recently pushed the limits of Pugs by porting Test::Builder to Perl 6. Here's what he learned about Perl 6, Pugs, and his design along the way.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, July 20-26, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i discussing garbage collection schemes, p6l rethinking object attribute access and plotting GC APIs and access, and p6c reporting problems, documenting PIL, and discussing the grammar.
[Perl.com]
Using Perl to Manage Plist Files
A common question is how to manage complex Plist files with scripts. The defaults command, which is often used to manage simple values in Plist files, does not easily manage the nested arrays or dictionaries that are present in most Plist files. In this first article of a two-part series, James Reynolds pulls together a little Perl and Cocoa to solve this problem.
[MacDevCenter.com]
An Introduction to Test::MockDBI
It is a sweet and fitting thing to test your code, but if you're working with non-Perl, you'll likely run into difficult situations. For example, how do you force a database connection failure to test that you can recover? Mark Leighton Fisher has an answer: mock up the database. He explains the design, goals, and use of Test::MockDBI.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, July 13-19, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with Pugs running on a JavaScript engine, GMC plans for Parrot, and typechecking and metamodel discussions about Perl 6.
[Perl.com]
Ten Essential Development Practices
Perl lets you be productive in everything from quick and dirty throwaway programs to big, business-critical applications. Building the latter requires some discipline, though. Damian Conway shares ten essential development practices to make your Perl programming easier, more reliable, and even more enjoyable.
[Perl.com]
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