[sb.pm] When should we meet next?

[Siddhartha Basu]

Hi,

Robert Rothenberg wrote:
> 

> Also, if you need help with a specific Perl question, why not post it to 
> the list?
Most definitely. But at this moment i am facing more of a design problem 
rather than code related. I think i can discuss it here so that i can ge 
some help with a better approach.
I work with making biological databases, mainly stroing 
metadata/annotation about genes/proteins in mysql. So, in most of the 
cases the inputs has different formats including non-standard 
ones.Naturally, the parsing routines also differs according to the 
inputs. So,...
* What will be a good approach for taking inputs for a program specially 
if i want to run it from a cron job.
	* From the command line by using @ARGV or Getopt::Long.
	* Or by setting environmental variables and accessing from $ENV
		hash.
Right now, i have mix of both but it is becoming cumbersome and i am 
thinking about having settling down with one approach.

* Sometimes i have do read a flat text file line by line, split the 
column and then check whether the data in that column is present in 
another text file. So, my approach is to either read the second text 
file to a dbm hash or to mysql database. The downside what i am facing 
is that i have to write a script for every possible text file to be 
searched. Text files with varying format also compounds the problem. 
Nothing else comes to my mind at this moment so i am dealing with a 
bunch of scattared scripts.

* What kind of format should i use for writing log file. Flat text file 
or xml format.





> 
> Rob
> 
> On 4/5/2004 11:01 AM Siddhartha Basu wrote:
> 
>> Here are some topic i can think of..
>>
>> * Working with databases. (both relational and dbm based).
> 
> 
> DBI and DBM files (using tie?) are separate topics.  Which do people on 
> the list prefer? I'm willing to do something on DBI, although I might 
> not have time to get a presentation ready for the next meeting.
> 
>> * Object oriented perl programming introduction. (what i am trying to 
>> learn right now).
> 
> 
> That's quite a topic.  Have you tried Damien Conway's "Object Oriented 
> Perl" book? It's an excellent book on object-oriented programming (in 
> general, not just for Perl).
> 
Yes, i am trying to grasp the ideas from the book. I am also impressed 
with the new book by "Randal Schwartz's" entitled "Perl objects, 
references, and modules". The style and flow of writing is excellent.


-sidd


Siddhartha Basu
Post-doc research fellow.
Dept. of Pharmacology.