Minutes for 17 October, 2002

The meeting started at 7pm.

Chris gave a very useful talk on regular expressions both mundane and
esoteric.  Including a good explanation of look-forward and look-behind
assertions, the regex debugger, efficiency, and more.  

His slides of the talk are on the website:
http://kw.pm.org/talks/1017-regex/

All of his examples came from the Camel book, so look there for additional
enlightenment.

After the talk we discussed a few items of interest- 

If you'd like a perlmongers teeshirt, one can be had for $10; drop Daniel
an email (da@coder.com) and he will bring your shirt to the next meeting.

We still have the opportunity to get Oreilly books at a fairly big
discount, through Rob, who is a Oreilly reseller.  We should try to get a
group order together in the next few months.

If anybody is interested in reviewing new Oreilly or Manning perl books,
we have the means to get review copies.  Contact Daniel if you've a
hankering to write up a few hundred words and put them somewhere public in
exchange for a shiny new book.

Next Month's topic: what are people interested in hearing or talking
about?  

We had a discussion of Template Toolkit and HTML::Template.  Of 3 people
who had used both professionally, Template Toolkit won the most praises;
HTML::Template was limited in comparison with TT's features, and TT's
source-code looks a lot better.

Chris did a brief demo of Template Toolkit code he used while preparing
his talk.

So, since we discussed these in fairly good depth, it looks like we don't
need a future talk on TT and HTML::Template.

People threw out a few ideas for future topics:

* Acme::Bleach and similar bizarre modules in the Acme namespace.
* OO Perl
* Inline (used to write perl subroutines in other languages; such as
   with Inline::C or Inline::ASM)
* Style Guides for large projects - clean perl? Best Practices?

A consensus arose that everybody wanted to hear about the last item the
most.  Daniel will be preparing this for November's meeting.

If people have other ideas for talks, please raise them on the list.

We had a go-around with introductions.  Although the group was smaller
than last month, there were three newcomers, all local professionals; two
new to the area.  Welcome!

Next month, we will most likely meet at a new location- the offices of
Quarry Communications (www.quarry.com) at the corner of King and Allen
Streets in Uptown Waterloo. More information will be provided on the list.

After a long and unminuted discussion, we broke up around 9:30.