A brief conversation with Craig Newmark from this year's Personal Democracy Forum 2008. In this interview Craig talks about the founding of Craiglist, how he came to found one of the most popular sites on the web. Craig also discusses his work with the Obama team and some of the important customer service issues facing Craigslist.
Programming language features and tools are obvious force multipliers for software developers. Development practices are less obvious. Here are some of my favorite productivity improvements.
Perl is 21 years old and Perl 5 is 14 years old. The language has aged well, but there's room to improve. Here are five features which to make hard things easy and difficult things possible.
Perl is a great language for processing text and automating tasks. It's also a fully-capable modern programming language, with effective modularization and object oriented capabilities. Though that sounds scary, they're easy to understand (and even easier to accomplish, through shiny modern tools such as Moose and Mouse).
Previous articles in this series showed how to use Perl for text processing and general purpose programming. Now it's time to demonstrate how to use Perl on the web.
At this year's OSCON, Terry Camerlengo sat down with Damian Conway, author of Perl Best Practices and Perl Hacks, to get his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, including the what-and-when of Perl 6 and what he thinks is important for the next generation of computer scientists. Watch the video (or read on) to hear what he says.
The DBD and DBD libraries are among the oldest and most successful perl libraries and existence, pretty much any perl program that talks to a database uses them. The creator of DBD, Tim Bunce, spent some time at OSCON 2008 talking to O'Reilly News about the history of DBD and how Tim has managed such a large and critical project.
For those of you who are Perl or PHP programmers and who also do heavy testing, there's an excellent chance that you've heard of TAP, the Test Anything Protocol. It's easy to implement, easy to parse, and is gaining in popularity. Because it's being implemented so widely, we've decided to form an IETF working group and we need your help.
Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using files and strings in modern Perl.
Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using modern Perl productively.
Amazon's Simple Storage Service provides a simple, flexible, and inexpensive way to manage online data storage. Amazon's S3 modules for Perl make storing and retrieving data in your own programs almost trivial, leaving Amazon to worry about hosting, scaling, and backups. Abel Lin shows how to store, retrieve, and store data with Amazon S3.
Many programmers know of the two main systems of templating. One embeds actual source code into the template. The other provides a mini language with loops, conditionals, and other control structures. There is a third way -- a reverse callback system. James Robson explains this best-of-both-worlds approach by demonstrating Perl's Template::Recall module.
In this course, participants will learn not only CGI, but the computer language Perl. This language is generally regarded as the most useful computer language for processing and manipulating text based data.
