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2004 Perl Advent Calendar Begins

Posted by timothy on from the hum-the-charlie-brown-song dept.

JeffMagnus writes "In another sign of the rapid approach of Christmas, Mark Fowler has posted the first entry in his 2004 Perl Advent Calendar. Each day until December 25, Mark will post a review of some Perl module he finds useful. This marks the fifth year for this Perl Christmastime tradition."

2 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. Nice idea by rwinston · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is a gem - I checked last year's Perl advent calendar daily. Well worth checking out - there's lot of useful info in there.

    --
    "If we cannot be free, then at least we can be cheap" -- Frank Zappa
    1. Re:Nice idea by jonadab · · Score: 3, Informative

      > December 1st they are talking about DateTime which is an extremely useful

      DateTime is more than just useful -- it's *essential*. I have no idea why it
      isn't in the core distribution, but it's on my list of things that have to be
      installed on any new computer before it's ready for use. Seriously, when was
      the last time you wrote a program of any significant size that *didn't* have
      to deal with dates and times? I use DateTime in *most* of my programs. (No,
      don't talk to me about localtime and gmtime; those are okay if all you want
      to know is what time it is right now (err, when the script was started, which
      is usually right now), but if you have to actually *do* anything with dates
      or times, you need something better.)

      The really great thing about DateTime is the large collection of related
      modules -- DateTime::Format::MySQL, DateTime::Format::Mail, and so on and so
      forth, one for just about every date/time format known to man. This makes it
      really easy to link various things together, converting dates from whatever
      format into DateTime objects for internal use (and for working with durations
      and stuff) and then formatting it in whatever format you need as necessary.

      DateTime and the modules associated with it have saved me hours of fiddling
      around with dates, time and again, in so many different projects I've lost
      count many times over, adding up to hundreds of hours I'm sure -- and I'm
      not even really a developer per se. (I do some development, but I also do
      support and training and network stuff and you name it; development is just
      a small part of my job really.)

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.