perl hacks / 2011-10-25 13:06:03
Google Reader just showed me Mithaldu’s blog post about the falling level of Google searches for the term “perl tutorial“. The fall is, of course, more than a little worrying and we should do what we can to get more people searching for Perl. But I wondered what results Google is currently returning for this search. It’s not a pretty sight.
- The first two results are for Nik Silver’s Perl tutorial from about twenty years ago. I know Nik and I know that he would be horrified to think that people were trying to learn Perl from this site. Nik has been responsible and left a clear notice at the top of the page stating how out of date it is and I understand him wanting to leave the page there for historical interest. But I still see questions on places like Stack Overflow from people who are obviously using this tutorial.
- The next link is to a site at perltutorial.org. That sounds encouraging, but it’s a rather pedestrian affair teaching dated and simplistic Perl and written by someone whose first language clearly isn’t English.
- The next result is to tiztag.com. It’s about as good as you’d expect from a site that insists on calling the language “PERL”.
- Next, we finally get to something worth using. It’s a link to the free online version of Simon Cozens’ book Beginning Perl. That’s good – but it’s still a little dated.
- Next we get to Robert’s Perl Tutorial. Which proudly boasts it was last updated on 20th April 1999. That’ll be up to date then.
- The next result is BradleyKuhn’s book Picking Up Perl. This was an attempt to produce an open source Perl tutorial book. It was a worthwhile project, but it was last updated in 2002.
- The next result is one that finally links to perl.com. It’s an article by Doug Sheppard called Beginner’s Introduction to Perl. I bet it was great when it was first published in October 2000.
- Towards the bottom of the list there are two links to Gabor’s recent (current?) Perl tutorial series. These are probably the only links on the list that we should be sharing with people wanting to learn Perl.
- Finally, there’s the NCSA Perl Tutorial. At least this page has realised that it is out of date and has closed down. Unfortunately the alternative sites that it suggests are of variable quality.
So there it is. The first page of results is of rather variable quality. There’s some great stuff there, some good but dated stuff and some dreadful stuff. But I’m sure there are better Perl tutorials out there. It would be great if the first link returned by Google was to learn.perl.org. But what other sites should be on the list? What good Perl tutorial resources do you know of?
Have I just given all those dreadful sites a healthy boost of Googlejuice by linking to them?
davblog / 2011-10-23 07:37:03
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism.
That’s how Wikipedia starts its article on Humanism. Humanists (and I count myself as one) believe that it is possible to ethical and fulfilling lives without the need to rely on supernatural explanations. As the British Humanist Association says:
We take responsibility for our actions and base our ethics on the goals of human welfare, happiness and fulfilment. We seek to make the best of the one life we have by creating meaning and purpose for ourselves, individually and together.
Surely it’s hard to take offence at these beliefs?
Step forward Nadine Dorries. In a blog post late on Friday night she took an altogether different view of Humanism, saying “I am not sure why anyone would admit to being a humanist and part of an organisation which has such extreme views.”
And what are these “extreme views” that some humanist organisation holds? She explains:
A humanist recently commented that, not only did he believe that abortion was acceptable right up to the moment of birth, but that termination of a child’s life was acceptable up until the point where the child had the ability to reason, understand and justify life.
Now, I don’t know if a humanist recently said that or not. Dorries doesn’t deem it important to give us a reference so that we can confirm her claim. So, of course, the claim should be seen on the same level as something that some bloke down the pub told he’d read on the internet once. In fact her blog post is likely to become the source that it used to justify conversations like that. Spreading unsubstantiated rumours like this is never helpful. But it’s a tactic that Dorries specialises in.
And, of course, even if someone say what Dorries claims, extrapolating the beliefs of a whole group of people from one extremist is ridiculous. To illustrate that, here are a few other “facts”. Just to redress the balance.
- A Christian once commented that all homosexuals should be chemically castrated. I’m not sure why anyone would admit to being part of an organisation which holds such extreme views.
- A Tory once told commented that he wanted to make the NHS into a marketplace. I’m not sure why anyone would admit to being part of an organisation which holds such extreme views.
- An MP once commented that she thought it was acceptable for a politician’s blog to be 70% fiction. I’m not sure why anyone would admit to being part of an organisation which holds such extreme views.
You might be wondering what humanists have done to invoke Dorries’ anger. The New Humanist magazine holds an annual “Bad Faith” poll to dishonour “the year’s most outspoken enemy of reason”. This year’s poll opened last week and Dorries is one of the nominations. Even before her bizarre outburst, she was in the lead. Now she has over twice the number of votes of her nearest competitor. I never thought I’d write this, but please… Vote For Dorries.
Update: In a blog post yesterday, Dorries published the “proof” of her claims. It turns out that the “recent” comment by a humanist is an out-of-context quote from a book that Peter Singer wrote in 1979. It’s clear that Dorries has a vastly different understanding of the meaning of the words “proof” and “recent” to the rest us.
The Ministry of Truth does a fine job of deconstructing Dorries’ claims.
perl hacks / 2011-10-18 13:49:37
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 round that, I’ve created a Google Custom Search Engine which searches known Perl web sites. You can try it out here.
If you want to use this search engine on your site, the code is below.
<div id="cse" style="width: 100%;">Loading</div>
<script src="//www.google.co.uk/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
google.load('search', '1', {language : 'en'});
google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
var customSearchControl = new google.search.CustomSearchControl('008350714774536055976:a2zesuxuecs');
customSearchControl.setResultSetSize(google.search.Search.FILTERED_CSE_RESULTSET);
customSearchControl.draw('cse');
}, true);
</script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//www.google.com/cse/style/look/default.css" type="text/css" />
perl hacks / 2011-10-15 12:51:57
A couple of times, I’ve complained here about the standard of Perl articles in the British magazine Linux Format.
Following the second of those articles I got into a discussion with Graham Morrison, the editor of the magazine and he offered me the opportunity to improve matters by writing my own short series of tutorials for them.
The first of those tutorials appears in issue 151 of the magazine which will be appearing in UK newsagents about now.
The series is called “Modern Perl” (in an attempt to distance it from their earlier tutorials) and the first article is about how easy it is to write a database application using DBIx::Class. The second article will take the same database and build it into a simple web application using Dancer. That will hopefully be in issue 153 (skipping an issue). There will probably be a third article in the series which will add features to the web application.
I’ll find out what my rights are to the articles and hopefully I’ll be able to put them on the web at some point in the future.
If you see a copy in your newsagents then please consider picking it up. And if you enjoy the article, then please let the magazine know.
davblog / 2011-10-08 16:19:36
Remember back to those hazy summers days in August? A group of media bloggers got together for a high-level summit in a pub in Camden. You were invited. You might even have been there. We talked, we drank, we laughed. A good time was had by all and it seemed like we had put the world to rights.
But, it seems that it didn’t work. There are still newspapers out there who are spouting nonsense and ignoring the voices of reason.
So we’re going to have to do it all over again. And you’re invited again. And this time we’re giving you more than four day’s notice.
We’ll be in the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road from 3pm on Saturday 29th October. We’ll be the shady-looking group of conspirators plotting in the corner. It’ll be impossible to miss us. There’s a Facebook event for it if that’s your thing.
