Being Helpful

I like to help people who know less Perl than I do. I like to help them to improve their standard of Perl. I particularly like to help to improve the standard of Perl that is found on random sites on the web. This is because if I find your nasty Perl code on the […]

Programming Like It’s 1999

This article was published yesterday. It shows a way to extract data about a film from IMDB and put it into a local database. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It produces SQL that you can then run to insert the data. It’s all rather nasty stuff and indicative of the fact that most people […]

Perl Search Engine

Often on sites like StackOverflow you’ll see questions that people could have answered for themselves if they had just searched the right web sites (usually perldoc or CPAN). But instead, they just went straight for Google and ended up with some dodgy, out of date information that just left them confused. In order to get […]

Context

This generated a lot of discussion in a training course that I ran this week so I thought it was worth sharing more widely. I think you can say that you understand the concept of context in Perl if you know what these four statements will print and (more importantly) can explain why they don’t […]

Too Easy or Too Hard

We hear a lot of people complaining that programming in Perl is too difficult, but I think that a lot of these problems stem from people making the opposite assumption – that writing Perl is easier than it actually is. Let me share a couple of examples. I’ve lightly disguised the companies in question – […]