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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."

12 comments

  1. Good Morning! by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: -1, Troll
    Each day until December 25, Mark will post a review of some Perl module he finds useful.

    Each day until December 25, the Slashdot "editors" will post one or more irrelevant / Slashvert / duplicate / full of spelling and grammatical errors / leftist tripe / Roland Piquepaille self promotion...

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    1. Re:Good Morning! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean it's really going to stop?! This is the best Xmas gift ever!

  2. 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.

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    1. Re:Nice idea by xmas2003 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Just to echo rwinston's comments above, this is darn good stuff ... and for December 1st they are talking about DateTime which is an extremely useful module which I've used in a variety of code.

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      Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
    2. Re:Nice idea by Rysc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I learned of HTML::Template in last years perl-advent, and at the moment it's an essential module in some in-house software I would otherwise not be being paid to develop.

      I will be watching this years closely for any useful tidbits.

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    3. 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.)

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    4. Re:Nice idea by xmas2003 · · Score: 1
      I agree with all you have written above - yea, why this isn't in the core distribution is a bit confusion - maybe for Perl6?!? ;-)

      BTW, I was tweeking my christmas webcam code today and I was actually surprised that I do NOT use DateTime there ... but I don't do much time manipulation and I intentionally tried to minimize modules inclusion for performance reasons ... but rest assured I use it in a lotta other code!

      --
      Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
  3. Don't miss last year's 19th! by rduke15 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Where he talks about some of the Acme:: modules: Perl 2003 Advent Calendar: Acme::Code::FreedomFighter.

    Then, you can go explore the rest of the Acme namespace.

  4. PHP by cuteseal · · Score: 1

    Awesome! Is there one for php/mysql too? I think that's more popular these days...

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    1. Re:PHP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Is there one for php/mysql too? I think that's more popular these days...

      mwa ha ha ha ha ha !!!

  5. Real dates for advent by randomtangent · · Score: 1

    Sorry upbringing kicking in here.
    Advent is not dec 1 - 25.
    It changes every year always starting on a sunday and ending on christmas eve.
    this year it started on the 28 of December.
    See complete calendar at http://www.cresourcei.org/cydatesA.html

    Not to take away form the program but calling it an advent calendar seems a bit off. Oh well the co-opting of a taken over stolen holiday must continue.

    --
    -Mike
    1. Re:Real dates for advent by IpalindromeI · · Score: 1

      this year it started on the 28 of December

      Dec 28 to Dec 24? Advent travels backward through time this year? That will be a great trick. Maybe we'll be able to track it using Time::Travel or Time::Warp.

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