David Cross's talk on Idiomatic Perl was excellent. I know of Dave from his book Data Munging with Perl so I had some idea of what he was going to be covering.

Now - I've been training in Perl for a number of years, so I didn't expect to learn much technically new, but I did expect to pick up nuances, subtleties, and an indication of a truly independent expert's view as to what is good and what is bad practice. Every programming language needs to have good facilities to cover each facet of its use, but Perl it seems has dozens of facilities for each need. And that's not necessarily a good thing because the code can be written in many styles. The trainer / course author, then, needs to be aware of what is common practice and what is being recommended as future common practice, and what should be avoided (and it's nice to know "why" too).

David - if you ever stumble across this, thank you for the talk. A strong reinforcement of some of the paradigms of Perl that I've been pushing, sometimes a little timidly, in our courses. A reminder of some excellent modules which I have neglected of late, but are now so main-line that they're in the Perl core. And a few golden nuggets which, in the spirit of open source I'll be delighted to use in my own work and spread further. Finally, one or two topics / words presented very differently to I present them - and an inspiration to me to vary, just a little, some of my performances.
(written 2004-10-12 16:00:10)

Commentator	says ...
Dave Cross:	Graham, Just stumbled across this entry. Glad to hear that you found the talk useful. I assume (from the date) that you were on the Geek Cruise around the Mediterranean. That was a fun week. Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for the write-up. Dave... (comment added 2005-07-12 11:42:15)

G209 - Well House Consultants - Keeping up to date
  [2564] Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more - (2010-01-05)
  [2352] Printed Directories - the start of the updating season - (2009-08-12)
  [2078] A lot has changed - but the memory lingers on - (2009-03-12)
  [2032] Mobile Internet - an alternative to hotel WiFi - (2009-02-09)
  [1488] New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses - (2007-12-30)
  [396] The next technologies - (2005-07-29)
  [250] We dont stand still - (2005-03-18)
  [160] Review of the Autumn - (2004-12-22)
  [143] Network Camera - (2004-12-07)
  [83] Geek Cruising - (2004-10-11)
  [82] Keeping up to date - (2004-10-10)

P219 - Perl - Libraries and Resources
  [2427] Operator overloading - redefining addition and other Perl tricks - (2009-09-27)
  [2234] Loading external code into Perl from a nonstandard directory - (2009-06-12)
  [2229] Do not re-invent the wheel - use a Perl module - (2009-06-11)
  [1865] Debugging and Data::Dumper in Perl - (2008-11-02)
  [1863] About dieing and exiting in Perl - (2008-11-01)
  [1444] Using English can slow you right down! - (2007-11-25)
  [1391] Ordnance Survey Grid Reference to Latitude / Longitude - (2007-10-14)
  [1235] Outputting numbers as words - MySQL with Perl or PHP - (2007-06-17)
  [1219] Judging the quality of contributed Perl code - (2007-06-06)
  [760] Self help in Perl - (2006-06-14)
  [737] Coloured text in a terminal from Perl - (2006-05-29)
  [712] Why reinvent the wheel - (2006-05-06)
  [358] Use standard Perl modules - (2005-06-25)
  [357] Where do Perl modules load from - (2005-06-24)
  [112] Avoid the wheel being re-invented by using Perl modules - (2004-11-08)

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Talk review - Idiomatic Perl, David Cross
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