Presentations
IMDb Senior Tech Leaders Talks
The presentations listed on this page are licensed under a 
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Best of the Rest
I've organized all the presentations by topic below, but here's the best ones, if you're looking for something interesting. There's also presentations I've done for work at IMDb (password protected).- What's New in Perl 5.10
Perl 5.10 was a huge advance over 5.8. An introduction to some of its great new features: it's like having the best parts of Perl6 today!
- JSON Schema
A schema language for validating JSON, written in JSON. What it's about, how to write it, how to use it.
- A Presentation about Presentations
How to give better presentations. A handout was also made available at this presentation.
Ainulindale - Music of the HolyShowing off both the power of Perl, and my own personal nerdliness with a presentation about how to use Perl to generate Tengwar writing (that is, Elvish from Lord of the Rings). A live demo is also available, and you're welcome to browse the code.
- Oneliners, and Seven Modules in Decreasing Order of Usefulness
How to use perl's command line flags to accomplish some amazing things in a single line of code. Some cool/weird/useless/hilarious modules available for Perl. Includes Buffy riding a Pony, and an implementation of the world's earliest algorithm written in Latin Perl.
- Moose: A Postmodern Object System for Perl
Good introduction to Moose, the most popular object system for modern perl programmers today. Also available on Slideshare.
- Object Oriented Design in Perl
Starts off slow, but has a great second half on a practical application of Design Patterns. Real code lifecycle (from bad to better), with application of the Strategy Pattern and the Decorator Pattern. And some funny pictures.
Perl Programming
If you're learning Perl you might find it more effective to go through the certificate courses in order, to get access to exercises, supplementary material, and book references.
Introduction to Perl Programming
- Welcome to Perl
Basics of the course, the certificate, and the books. Running perl itself. Finding documentation. How to get started.
- A Whirlwind Tour of Perl
Creating a working ELIZA in Perl in just 20 minutes, with basic features.
- Simple Perl Variables
Perl's simple variables are called scalars, because they hold one value. Perl's dynamic types. The wondrous powers of strings.
- Perl Control Structures
Using for, while, flow control, and more.
- Arrays in Perl
Using arrays.
- Hashes In Perl
Managing key-value maps/dictionaries in perl. The fat comma.
- Input and Output in Perl
How to read and write any file or stream, or anything that can act like one.
- Regular Expressions in Perl
Perl's most powerful and most emulated feature, the regular expression engine, for matching, replacing, and processing text.
- Subroutines in Perl
Writing and calling functions. Extracting function arguments. Return values.
- Dates and Times in Perl
How Perl handles dates. Why perl has no Year 2000 problem, and why some perls have a Year 2038 problem. Printing and parsing dates.
- Process Management in Perl
How to kick off any external program via perl.
- Persistency in Perl
Saving state with Storable and Data::Dumper.
Advanced Perl Programming
- Review of Perl
Examples of what's been covered so far.
- Unit Testing in Perl
How to write and run unit tests using TAP, the Test Anything Protocol
- References in Perl
Perl references. Perl's memory management.
- Perl Packages
Perl packages as namespaces. Exporting functions.
- Basic Object Oriented Programming in Perl
Using hashreferences as objects. Attributes and methods. Using bless.
- Advanced Object Oriented Perl Programming
Inheritance, composition, polymorphism. Using Moose Roles. Destructors in Perl.
- Inside Out Objects in Perl
Using Perl closures to maintain truly private object state, as advocated by Damian Conway.
- Moose: A Postmodern Object System for Perl
Good introduction to Moose, the most popular object system for modern perl programmers today. Also available on Slideshare.
- Object Oriented Design in Perl
Design Patterns and Object Design. Inheritance, composition, and delegation. The Strategy Pattern and the Decorator Pattern, with concrete examples applying them in Perl.
Perl and the Internet
- Basic CGI Programming with Perl
- More CGI Programming with Perl
- State in Web Applications
- Intro to Web Services in Perl
Using SOAP and RSS. Creating services and clients.
- XML Processing in Perl
Simple access to XML documents.
- mod_perl and HTML::Mason
Writing advanced web applications beyond CGI, by using mod_perl and perl-based templating languages like HTML::Mason.