An overview of stuff I learned teaching perl last year, and what I might do differently if I did it again in the future

1. Teaching Perl For Fun
and Advocacy
By John Napiorkowski,
Sponsored by Shutterstock, LLC
Copyright 2012

2. Images Courtesy of
Shutterstock
http://www.shutterstock.com/jobs.mhtml

3. With Thanks To
General Assembly
http://generalassemb.ly/

4. http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html

6. What Sucks About
Perl?

7. Line Noise /
Write Only
Ugly
Only good for Scripts
There are Better
Not Modern Options
Fine for Text Processing
Perl Is Dead
Hard To Learn
Terrible Docs
CPAN is Busted!

10. For me, Inspiration is
helping someone
construct their own
version of the idea,
which is appropriate to
their needs and
conceptual context.

17. my $first_class = Perl->o_fun

19. One Liner Example
$perl -MModern::Perl -ne 'say "Hello ". $_'
John
Hello John

21. Step By Step
• Command Interpreter
• Switches
• Code
• STDIN/OUT
• Implicit Arguments

22. As A Script
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Modern::Perl;
say "Hello ". shift;

23. $ perl myscript.pl John
Hello John

24. A Reusable Object
package HelloName;
use Moose;
has name => (is=> "ro", required=>1);
sub hello {
my ($self) = @_;
return "Hello ".$self->name;
}
1;

25. Using Your Object
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Modern::Perl;
use HelloName;
my $obj = HelloName->new(name=>shift);
say $obj->hello;

26. $ perl myscript2.pl John
Hello John

29. Testing
use HelloName;
use Test::Most;
my $obj = HelloName->new(name=>'John');
is $obj->name, 'John';
is $obj->hello, 'Hello John';
done_testing;

30. $ prove -v hello-name.t
hello-name.t ..
ok 1
ok 2
1..2
ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=2, 0 wallclock secs
Result: PASS

31. As a Website
use Modern::Perl;
use HelloName;
my $obj = HelloName->new( name =>
$ENV{HelloName_name} );
my $app = sub {
return [
200 => [ "Content-Type" => "text/plain"],
[ $obj->hello ],
];
};

32. $ HelloName_name=John plackup app.psgi
HTTP::Server::PSGI: Accepting connections
at http://0:5000/

33. perldoc plackup

35. A Running Website!

36. How To Learn More
• Modern Perl book
• Task::Kensho
• perl.org
• Books (Catalyst Book)
• IRC and Mailing lists

37. Classes 2 - 8
• Perl: History, ecosystem, community and installing.
• More Perl than I got paid to know at my first job.
• Creating your first Perl Application and following
community standards.
• Perl: Review idioms and common solutions.
• Objects: Moose, strategies for reusability.
• Working: Building the Guestbook Application
• Summary: Review, things to avoid, where to go next.

38. (Guest Lecture on
Task::Kensho)++

39. APEIRON++

40. GeneralAssembly::Guestbook
https://github.com/jjn1056/GeneralAssembly-Guestbook

41. “Perl was always
designed to be an
Evolving Language”
- Larry Wall, Original Perl Language Designer

42. Student Feedback
• Liked implicit arguments and return values.
• Neutral on syntax and $@%*.
• Appreciation for cpanm, local::lib, perlbrew.
• Plack is a hit...
• ...and so was Moose!

43. Stumbled a bit on installing Perl and CPAN modules, and
a bit of trouble understanding local::lib.

44. Jury out on documentation and learning tools

46. The First Class is
Great :)

47. The Second Class
should have been
focused exclusively on
Installing Perl

48. “More Perl than I got paid to know at my first job.”
Maybe next time use an old script as an example?

49. Make Better Use of Social Media

50. Guest Lecturer was a good idea

51. (system Perl)--

52. Paper Handouts /
Take-aways?

58. http://www.shutterstock.com/jobs.mhtml