News and Information Blog

Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10, Part 2

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.

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A Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10

Using Amazon S3 from Perl

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.

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Reverse Callback Templating

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.

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Elements of Access Control

Some data is private. Other data, less so. Secure applications make it possible--and easy--to keep user data visible to the right people and invisible to the wrong people. Vladi Belperchinov explains how access control works and demonstrates with working code suitable for implementing your own access controls.

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How to Tell Your Perl Story (at OSCON)

Have you done something stunningly cool or staggeringly useful with Perl in the past year? Conference season will be here soon; it's time to consider giving a talk to your local monger group, a regional conference, or even OSCON. Perl track committee member brian d foy gives several guidelines to help you decide what to talk about and how to present it.

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Memories of 20 Years of Perl

The Perl community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Perl. Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they've solved and memories they've made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language.

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Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...

Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion describes the state of Perl, the language and the community. In his 11th address, he discussed the past, present, and future of scripting languages, including the several dimensions of design decisions important to the development of Perl 6.

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PDF Processing with Perl

Adobe's PDF is a well-established format for transferring pixel-perfect documents. It's not nearly as malleable as plain text, but several CPAN modules make creating, manipulating, and reusing PDFs much easier. Detlef Groth demonstrates how to use PDF::Reuse.

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Option and Configuration Processing Made Easy

Many useful programs take arguments and configuration options. It's easy to add one or two, but as your program grows, the difficulty of allowing configuration concisely and intelligently also grows. Jon Allen demonstrates how to unify argument and configuration processing in a way that lets you write good code and your users get on with their work.

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