Notes for Raleigh Perl Mongers Meeting

We met again at Glaxo Wellcome, this time for a social gathering... Since Ray Grimaila was unavailable, Don Cain stepped in and did host duty. Many thanks, Don, for giving so freely of your time!

In a nutshell, we sat around, ate, drank and made merry. Simon Karpen won this month's giveaway, which was the new Perl CD Bookshelf (comprised of Perl in a Nutshell along with six other O'Reilly books on CD-ROM). Congrats, Simon!

We spent a few minutes talking about the months to come, and decided on the following schedule.

• September: Three-part discussion. In no particular order, we'll have talks by Derek Lane, Bill Cowan and me (John Klassa). Derek will give a book review on the recent O'Reilly book that explains how to write Apache modules with perl. Bill will talk about what's new and exciting in the world of perl, with an eye toward the WinNT side of the house. Lastly, I'll talk about a cool little perl/Tk script I wrote (inspired by a similar offering among the demos that come with python) to show you, dynamically, how a regex is doing against a target string.
• October: Round-table discussion on languages. We'll have individuals (or teams, if desired) talk about various other languages, in terms of how they stack up against perl (pros/cons, differences/similarities, that sort of thing). Go to the sign-up page to sign up for the language of your choosing.
• November: A group "code review". We're going to take one or more pieces of code and evaluate them, individually, with an eye toward sharing our opinions with the group. We'll be critiquing things like style, [over-]use of perl idioms and the like.
• December: Christmas social... Sign up to bring something, please.

Many thanks to the folks who brought food/drink for this month's gathering! See you next month!

-John Klassa