SPUG: Jan 15 Mtg: Intro2Perl ; Ingy's YAML.pm

Tim Maher/CONSULTIX tim at consultix-inc.com
Mon Jan 7 16:47:53 CST 2002


SPUGsters,

Brian Ingerson tells me he'll be leaving for greener pastures
on Jan. 16th, and he wants to say farewell to SPUG by telling us
about his latest module.  (Maybe it'll be another world-changing
prize winner, like Inline.pm?)  So come see him on the 15th before
he makes his escape from the soggy Northwest.  Also, in keeping
with our policy of featuring Beginner-level topics periodically,
I'll be giving an "Intro to Perl" talk for the first half of the
meeting.

I'll update the web-site shortly with all the meeting info,
but in the meantime, here's the easy-to-pass-around text version.

See you there!

-Tim
P.S.  Anyone who would like to make a presentation of some kind at any
of the upcoming meetings please post a message to the list voicing your
ideas.
=============================================================
|  Tim Maher, Ph.D.             Tel: (206) 781-UNIX/8649    |
|  SPUG Founder & Leader      Email: spug at seattleperl.org   |
|  Seattle Perl Users Group    HTTP: www.seattleperl.org    |
=============================================================
                      Seattle Perl Users Group
                          January Meeting

    Topic #1: "Intro. to Perl"
     Speaker: Tim Maher, Consultix (http://www.consultix-inc.com)

    Topic #2: "YAML: Yet Another Markup Language"
     Speaker: Brian "Ingy" Ingerson, formerly of ActiveState Corp.

     Cost: Free!

     Time: January 15th, 2002, 7pm-9pm
 Location: Safeco Tower auditorium, University District, Seattle
More Info: www.seattleperl.org

Pre/Post Meeting:
           Big Time Brewery and Alehouse
           http://www.bigtimebrewery.com
	   4133 University Way NE, Seattle

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

**  Intro. to Perl  **
Tim Maher, Consultix (tim at consultix-inc.com)

Topics:
+ Perl as an outgrowth of the grep, sed, awk,and shell utilities of UNIX
+ Perl documentation
+ Perl culture and gatherings
+ Perl educational resources, online and otherwise
+ Elementary examples of simple Perl programs
+ What a module is, and where to look for free ones (viz., CPAN)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

**  YAML.pm: Yet Another Markup Language  **
Brian "Ingy" Ingerson (ingy at cpan.org)

YAML (Yet Another Markup Language; aka YAML Ain't Markup Language)
is a generic data serialization language that is optimized for
human readability. It can be used to express the data structures
of most modern programming languages.  (including Perl!!!) More
information can be found at http://www.yaml.org/.

Does your camel YAML?

       YAML is readable for people.
           It makes clear sense out of complex data structures.
           You should find that YAML is an exceptional data dump-
           ing tool. Structure is shown through indentation, YAML
           supports recursive data, and hash keys are sorted by
           default. In addition, YAML supports several styles of
           scalar formatting for different types of data.

       YAML is editable.
           YAML was designed from the ground up to be the ulti-
           mate syntax for configuration files. All almost all
           programs need configuration files, so why invent a new
           syntax for each one. And why subject users to the com-
           plexities of XML or native Perl code.

       YAML is multilingual
           Yes, YAML supports Unicode. But I'm actually referring
           to programming languages. YAML was designed to meet
           the serialization needs of Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP,
           Java. It was also designed to be interoperable between
           those languages. That means any YAML serialization
           produced by Perl can be processed by Python, and be
           guaranteed to return the data structure intact. (Even
           if it contained Perl specific structures like GLOBs)

       YAML is taint safe.
           Using modules like Data::Dumper for serialization is
           fine as long as you can be sure that nobody can tamper
           with your data files or transmissions. That's because
           you need to use Perl's "eval()" built-in to deserial-
           ize the data. Somebody could add a snippet of Perl to
           erase your files.

       Plus much more...

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