use Perl

Peter Scott writes "Peter Scott has just created a learning Perl DVD, published by Addison Wesley. 4+ hours of Perl instruction on screencast with video of the author introducing each lesson. This is an introduction to Perl for the student who learns by example and prefers a visual and/or auditory style.

For more information, see Perl Fundamentals."

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the March 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #15 "Oslo". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the March 2009 release is available from http://www.pmichaud.com/perl6/rakudo-2009-03.tar.gz

However, because of the rapid pace of Rakudo development and addition of new features, we still recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain the latest version directly from the main repository at github -- more on this in a bit.

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named "Oslo" in honor of the organizers of the 2009 Nordic Perl Workshop [2], April 16-17, 2009. The 2009 Nordic Perl Workshop will have a special focus on Perl 6, Rakudo Perl, and Parrot, including Perl 6 tutorials and hackathons after the conference itself.

A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Rakudo Perl now uses git [3] for its version control system, hosted at http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo . The README file there is kept up-to-date with the latest instructions for obtaining and building Rakudo Perl.

In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've made the following major changes and improvements:

• Rakudo is now passing 7273 spectests. This is an increase of 197 passing tests since the February 2009 release.
• The eval() construct now understands lexical variables from an outer scope.
• More of the builtin functions ("settings") are being written in Perl 6.
• Rakudo supports the "R" (reverse) metaoperator.
• Parsing of if, unless, while, until, etc. statements after blocks now works correctly.
• The Q quote operator is now implemented, along with several adverbial forms. In particular, the Q:PIR form allows inline PIR to be included in Perl 6 code.
• Multi-method dispatch now works with inheritance also.

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible. The next release of Rakudo (#16) is scheduled for April 23, 2009.

References:
[1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/
[2] Nordic Perl Workshop 2009, http://www.perlworkshop.no/npw2009/
[3] Git version control system, http://git-scm.org/

Eric Wilhelm writes "The Perl Foundation has been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009 as a mentor organization!

Now is the time for all good Perl Mongers to encourage students to apply for the program. Qualifying students should note the April 3rd deadline, but also note that the best proposals usually arrive about one week before the deadline.

If you are interested in mentoring, sign up and add your suggestions to the project ideas page."

ehdonhon writes "The very first Yet Another Perl Conference was held in '99. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of that event, we are offering a special YAPC|10 admission price of $99 — but only for 10 days! After that, the price goes up to $125. Be sure to buy your ticket at YAPC10.org today.

While you're at it, why not submit a talk for YAPC? Deadline for talk proposals is Friday, 24 April 2009. Submit your talk today!"

The very first Yet Another Perl Conference was held in '99. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of that event, we are offering a special YAPC|10 admission price of $99 — but only for 10 days! After that, the price goes up to $125. The full pricing schedule is below:

10th Anniversary Special $99 Mar 14--24
Standard pricing $125 Mar 25--May 31
Late registration $150 After May 31

The website and the registration for second YAPC::Russia are open now.

This year we’d like to make some changes in the general layout of the conference and would try to add master classes or tutorials for people who’d like to teach Perl.

From previous year we bring YAPC::Russia::Golf content; Jerom is already preparing tasks for them. Of course, there will be lightning talks, coffee-breaks, preconference Friday meeting and attendees dinner.

Attendance is free of charge.

The conference is organized by DeepText and Moscow.pm. This is our 9th event. People who are responsible for that have already organized Perl events in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Bulgaria. The distance between the most easten and the most western cities of our events is 9000 km.