I thought I’d pretty much finished blogging about my upcoming Modern Web Development with Perl and Dancer training course. But a couple of days ago I saw a tweet that reminded me about an aspect that I’d completely forgotten.
could you give a few details about the intended audience? Perl level? Familiarity with x? Etc?
— Manni (@_confuseAcat_) July 29, 2016
And he’s right, of course. I haven’t mentioned that at all. Let’s put that right.
As it happens, yesterday I pretty much finished writing the slides for the course. So that means that I know what I’ll be covering and, therefore, what the attendees will need to know.
What You’ll Need To Know
To start with, I need to make it clear that this is not a “beginning Perl” course. There’s a lot of new topics to cover and if Perl itself was on the list then it would need to be a two or three day course.
So you’ll need to know Perl. But to what level?
If you’ve read Intermediate Perl then you’ll be fine. That means you’ll need to understand how to use modules, packages and references. Probably the most advanced Perl concept we’ll need is subroutine references. But, to be honest, if you’re not completely comfortable with them, that won’t be a problem.
You’ll need to know a bit about how web pages are made – so a little bit of HTML and CSS. We’ll be using Bootstrap to deal with most of our CSS, so you won’t need to do anything at all complicated with CSS. If you understand the difference between a class and an id in CSS terms then you’ll be fine.
We’ll be using quite a lot of Javascript – specifically jQuery with Mustache. I’m no Javascript expert, so it’s likely that many of the people in the class will know more than me. If you’ve never used jQuery, then I recommend that you spend a couple of hours looking into it before coming to the class. You don’t need to know anything about Mustache before the course.
There will be a database at the back-end of the app. I’ll be running MySQL (actually, probably MariaDB), but any of the popular database systems will work – just as long as Perl’s DBI supports it. I’ll supply SQL to set up the database and insert some test data and we’ll be using DBIx::Class which will remove the need to know any SQL. But it would be good if you were familiar with whatever database system you’re using – to the extent that you can run queries against your local database.
What You’ll Need to Bring
You’ll need a laptop. I’m assuming that we’ll have access to WiFi at the training venue, but it would be great if you could install as much as possible of the required software before the day – just so we save a bit of time.
My laptop runs Windows 10, but I do all of my development in a virtual machine running Fedora 24. I’m happy for you to work in Windows or OSX, but the level of support I can provide for people not running Linux will be limited.
You’ll need Perl installed. Linux and OSX will already have a version of Perl installed. For Windows users, I recommend Strawberry Perl. Get the most recent version of Perl that you can install. The current version is 5.24. I think my laptop has 5.22. Anything earlier than 5.10 is unlikely to be particularly useful.
You’ll need some CPAN modules installed. These are all pretty common modules:
- Dancer2
- Dancer2::Plugin::DBIC
- DBIx::Class
- DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader
- DBI
- DBD::* (for whatever database you are using – e.g. DBD::mysql)
- Moose
- MooseX::NonMoose
- MooseX::MarkAsMethods
- DateTime
- DateTime::Format::Strptime
- Template
You’ll need a database server installed on your laptop. As I mentioned above, any of the popular database engines will work – but I’ll be using MariaDB. Make sure that you know how to start the database server and connect to it using a command line program.
You’ll need a Git client so that you can clone the Git repository that contains the source code for the course. You’ll want to ensure the the repository is cloned to your laptop before turning up to the course. You might even want to glance through some of the code to get a head-start on the rest of the attendees.
You can find the course code at
The CSS and Javascript libraries are all included in the Git repository.
I think that’s about all you need to know. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
I’ve been really pleased with the reaction to this course. We already have a large number of people signed up. So many, in fact, that I need to start thinking about the number of people I have room for. I think we can get another five (perhaps ten) people in. So if you’re thinking of signing up, please do it soon to avoid disappointment (trainers say stuff like this for every course – but this time it’s really true).
Hope to see some of you in Cluj-Napoca.
