[roch-pm] University of Perl

[Justin C. Sherrill]

Here's a summary:

I flew in early Thursday morning for the first all-day session, Database
Programming with Perl, with Randal Schwartz.  It was a good presentation.
Randal is an experienced speaker, though he makes horrible jokes.  (Not
even bad puns - just plain bad jokes, and a lot of them.)  If you've used
DBI::whatever a lot, this wouldn't be too hard a tutorial.

I went out with a number of the teachers and students that evening, though
I begged out early before the part with the strippers and the really heavy
drinking.  Dave, the head of the NYC PM group, is very gregarious, and I
spent some time talking to him and some other folks I don't remember the
names of.  Randal has a Stonehenge coworker named Bill who can absorb a
lot of alcohol and has no sense of shame.

The next day, the AM class was "Tricks of the Wizards" with Mark-Jason
Dominus.  This wasn't terribly useful.  He spent most of his time talking
about globs (which I think are going away in Perl 6?) and it was somewhat
disjointed, as he tended to introduce solutions in code before noting what
problem they were solving.

The afternoon session was "Introduction to mod_perl" by Nat Torkington,
who was hung over from the night before.  He pulled off an entertaining
presentation, though.  That class was pretty good at covering mod_perl
setup and usage.  Though mod_perl is pretty well documented on the net, it
was nice to have it presented in a linear, collected fashion.

I haven't been (yet) to yapc or any of the other Perl conferences, so I
don't have a direct comparison.  It was certainly well-managed, and the
documentation booklets from each class were worth saving.  (They tended to
be more than a hundred pages of the slides used in each session)  The next
U of P session will apparently be in 2002.

Justin C. Sherrill
Rochester Road Runner Webmaster
http://www.rochester.rr.com/
"Think slow, type fats"

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