Classes and Talks by Mark Jason Dominus
Upcoming public appearances
About the speaker
Pricing and logistical information
Paid Classes
Advanced Topics in Perl (3-5 days)
Advanced Topics in Perl covers the
construction and operations of modules, the Exporter, Perl's namespace
structure, object-oriented programming, advanced use of subroutines,
exception handling, the debugger, and the Perl symbol table. It
overlaps Intermediate Topics in Perl and
Object-Oriented Programming. It also incorporates
the short Regular Expression Mastery class.
Full details are available
CGI Programming with Perl (3-5 days)
A comprehensive treatment of the development of applications that
deliver dynamic content on the World-Wide Web. All the important
issues are discussed, including simple forms, SQL database access,
concurrency issues, and authentication, cryptography, and security.
Full details are available
Hands-On Introduction to Perl (2-3 days)
An introduction to Perl for programmers who already have
experience with other languages. This class covers all of Perl's
major language features: Scalars, arrays, and hashes; files and
filehandles; control structures; and important built-in functions.
The three-day version covers references, complex data structures,
and DBI, the Perl interface to SQL databases.
Full details are available
Higher-Order Perl (3 hours)
(Advanced Programming Techniques for Perl)
(Why Perl is Better than Those Other Languages)
(Stolen Secrets of the Wizards of the Ivory Tower)
One of Perl's most valuable (but least-used) features is the ability
to use functions as if they were data: to pass functions as arguments
to other functions, and to write functions that construct and return
new functions on request. This feature is the basis of many
widely-used techniques, such as callbacks, and also some techniques
that aren't as widely-used, but should be.
Full details are available
"How do I delete a line from a file?" (3 hours)
(Strategies for Lightweight Databases)
Perl provides two extremely inexpensive and simple solutions to data
retrieval: Flat text files and DBM files. We'll examine the
principles, programming, and tradeoffs of both techniques, and take a
detailed look at the best modules for managing files of both kinds.
20071107: Now available online for free.
Full details are available
Intermediate Topics in Perl (2-3 days)
(Using and Building Modules)
This class covers features of Perl essential for large-scale and
industrial programming: Modules; exportation; use; Perl's
compile and run phases; CPAN; some essential standard modules;
Perl's support for unit testing; debugging strategies; and
references and compound data structures.
Full details are available
Making Programs Faster (3 hours)
(Benchmarking, Profiling, and Performance Tuning)
Almost every application must eventually be made to run faster.
Performance tuning of applications has long been a dark art,
successfully practiced by very few. This class will bring it into the
light and show you how. We will investigate tools, strategies, and
philosophies, all aimed at making programs faster with as little
effort as possible.
Full details are available
Object-Oriented Programming In Perl (3 days)
This introduction to scalable programming covers in Perl all basic
principles of OOP including discussing classes, objects, methods,
single and multiple inheritance, and Perl syntax for these. The class
also includes sections on object-oriented design and more specialized
topics such as autoloading and conditional loading of modules.
Full details are available
Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags (3-6 hours)
It's hard to write great code, but it doesn't have to be hard to write
good code. 'Red flags' are easy-to-see signs that you have an easy
opportunity to make your code better. I'll show many red flags in
real programs I've gathered and show easy ways to make these programs
smaller, faster, and simpler to understand.
Full details are available
Perl Regular Expression Mastery (3 hours)
Almost everyone has written a regex that didn't behave as expected.
This class will fix that. We'll take a detailed look at Perl's regex
matching algorithm and learn how to predict what it will do and how
long it will take. This session will demystify regular expressions.
Full details are available
Programing with Iterators and Generators (3 hours)
Everyone loves filehandles because they let you get data from a file a
bit at a time, as you need it. In this class we'll examine this
'iterator' technique in detail, and see how it can cut the size of
complex database lookup and web spidering modules by fifty percent.
Full details are available
Tricks of the Wizards (3 hours)
(Perl Tricks and Programming Technique)
This class will explore Perl's most unusual features: Globs, tie,
AUTOLOAD, and source filters. We'll look at modules that use these
features, written by famous wizards like Tom Christiansen, Damian
Conway, and Larry Wall, and learn what they're for and how they work.
Full details are available
Web Application Security (6 hours (half-day versions available))
(Security with Apache)
CGI applications, mod_perl, servlets, and other generators of
dynamic web content represent an enormous security threat, one that
would not even have been considered by competent system administrators
of the 1980's. This class will examine the most important classes of
web-based security threats and discuss responses to them. It
exhaustively examines Perl's unique `tainting' feature which can
detect many security errors before they can cause any harm.
Full details are available
Welcome to my ~/bin (3 hours)
Over the years, I have built up a large collection of handy utilities
in Perl. I'll take you on a tour of these utilities and show you what
they do and how they work.
Full details are available
Free Talks
Arithmetic with Continued Fractions (60 minutes)
Multiprecision calculations are usually done with "synthetic
numerals": long strings of decimal or binary digits. Continued
fractions are a fascinating alternative that are preferable in many
ways; for example, unlike synthetic numerals, continued fractions can
represent all rational numbers finitely. In this talk, I explain what
continued fractions are and how to calculate with them.
(This talk is not Perl-related.)
Full details are available
Atypical Typing (75 minutes)
A short history of type systems, and an introduction to Haskell's
advanced type inference, with a stunning final example in which
Haskell's type checker detected an infinite loop error at compile
time.
Full details are available
Classic Unix Security Problems (60 minutes)
A survey of security problems in early Unix systems.
Full details are available
Conference Presentation Judo (30 minutes)
Secrets of how to give a good three-hour conference tutorial.
Full details are available
Debugging the de Bruijn Sequence (5 minutes)
Debugging the de Bruijn sequence.
Full details are available
"Design Patterns" Aren't (5 minutes)
The "design patterns" movement in software claims to have been
inspired by the works of architect Christopher Alexander. But an
examination of Alexander's books reveals that he was actually talking
about something much more interesting.
Readers are cautioned that these slides were not originally
intended for distribution on the web; they were written to accompany a
five minute long talk given at Yet
Another Perl Conference. They should not, therefore, be taken as
a complete or well-reasoned presentation of my thoughts on this matter.
Full details are available
Dirty Secrets of the Perl Regex Engine (60 minutes)
Here's the description of this talk from the brochure:
This talk is too short to tell you all about how the Perl regex
engine works---that would take years, and cost millions of lives.
Instead, I'll do three very brief case studies of how it handles
certain specific features. You've probably always suspected that the
Perl regex engine concealed filthy secrets and nasty surprises;
these three features are noteworthy for being particularly
disgusting.
Barf bags will be provided.
Mark-Jason Dominus wrote the back-end of ActiveState's regex debugger.
He is presently recuperating at the Miskatonic University Hospital in
Whately, Massachusetts.
Full details are available
File Locking Tricks and Traps (15 minutes)
This short talk presents several common pitfalls of file locking
and a few useful tricks for using file locking more effectively.
Full details are available
Functional Programming in Perl (60 minutes)
I discuss the value of functional programming techniques,
with particular attention to the value that they provide to
the great proletariat of the programming community. I also talk
about the support that Perl provides for those techniques, and
the support that it fails to provide, and I'll contrast this
support with that of similar languages, such as Python.
Full details are available
git-rebase: Why and How (35 minutes)
git-rebase is probably the most useful
intermediate-difficulty tool in Git. I will describe some of its many
uses and explain what it is doing and how to use it.
Full details are available
Greenlight (60 minutes)
(is a Git branch merging service)
Greenlight is a Git branch merging service. When you want to land code
on master, you notify Greenlight, which takes care of it for
you. Easy!
Full details are available
Help! Help! (10 minutes)
This compendium of Perl introspection techniques will amaze, confound,
or disgust you!
Full details are available
Higher-order Parsing (60 minutes)
Higher-order parsing techniques for Perl: using functions to generate
parsers and assemble simple parsers into more complicated parsers.
Full details are available
Higher-order Parsing (60 minutes)
Higher-order parsing techniques for Perl: using functions to generate
parsers and assemble simple parsers into more complicated parsers.
Full details are available
Historical how and why of hash tables (35 minutes)
History of lightweight associative data structures in programming languages
Full details are available
Hook::LexWrap (30 minutes)
This is a discussion of the usage and internals of Damian Conway's
Hook::LexWrap module.
Full details are available
The Identity Function (35 minutes)
I gave this bizarre talk at TPC 2001 in San Diego. The title backfired:
Too many people didn't know what the identity function was, and those
who did know assumed that I must have been referring to something
else.
The identity function is a function such as sub identity {
return $_[0] } which returns its argument unchanged. In this
talk, I show four unexpectedly useful uses for the identity function.
Full details are available
I found the best anagrams in English!! (10 minutes)
Two different algorithms for scoring anagrams by quality.
Full details are available
Internals of Familiar Unix Commands (60 minutes)
This talk is about the Unix process model, the semantics of the
fork and exec calls, and how this impacts the design
of certain well-known Unix commands such as the shell, ls,
nice, and others.
Full details are available
Internals of the ext2 Filesystem (60 minutes)
ext2fs is the most popular disk filesystem type for Linux
systems. I discuss the main structures of the filesystem and show
some of the kernel code that deals with it.
Full details are available
Internals of the qmail Mailer (75 minutes)
This talk is an overview of the qmail mail system and its
components, with a few implementation details.
Full details are available
It came from... the HOLD SPACE! (70 minutes)
(Alien horrors from the dawn of Unix)
How did we get anything done before the invention of Perl, Python, and
those other guys? Answer: It wasn't always easy.
Full details are available
Join my Army of Git Zombies! (60 minutes)
A very short introduction to git and its internals.
(This talk is not Perl-related.)
Full details are available
Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention (60 minutes)
(Git Is Awesome)
Why Git is awesome. Does not show you how to use Git at all, but may
convince you that Linus Torvalds is a genius.
(This talk is not Perl-related.)
Full details are available
My Favorite NP-Complete Problem (10 minutes)
What is my favorite NP-complete problem
and
what is an NP-complete problem anyway?
Full details are available
Perl Contains the Lambda Calculus (90 minutes)
(How to write a 163 line program to compute 1+1)
The lambda-calculus is an abstract model of computation, used to
investigate fundamental questions of what can be computed and how. It
is in some ways the simplest possible model of a programming language.
A certain subset of Perl is essentially identical to the lambda
calculus, so one can investigate the lambda calculus by merely writing
programs in Perl.
Full details are available
The Perl Hardware Store (45 minutes)
(Tools You Didn't Know You Needed)
Six useful Perl tools that you probably didn't know you needed.
Full details are available
The Perl Hardware Store (DC.pm Version) (90 minutes)
Twelve useful Perl tools that you probably didn't know you needed.
Full details are available
The Perl Hardware Store (NYLUG Version) (45 minutes)
Nine more useful Perl tools that you probably didn't know you needed.
Full details are available
PIGS in SPACE!!! (50 minutes)
Moonpig is an innovative billing and accounting system that Rik
Signes and I worked on between 2010 and 2012. This talk is about some
of the non-obvious technical choices we made that made Moonpig a
success.
Full details are available
Pseudohashes (20 minutes)
(History of a major mistake)
In 1998 work started on a Perl feature called “pseudohashes”, a major
reworking of the way Perl represented objects. This work was a
complete failure, and after ten years it was removed again. What went wrong, and why?
Full details are available
Quantitative Analysis of Memoization (10 minutes)
At a PHL.pm meeting, Walt
Mankowski gave a talk about an occasion when the Memoize
module didn't work for him---it made his program slower instead of
faster. I gave this complementary talk explaining why.
Full details are available
Return To The Perl Hardware Store (45 minutes)
(More Tools You Didn't Know You Needed)
Eight more useful Perl tools that you probably didn't know you needed.
Full details are available
Roles in Moonpig (30 minutes)
A short and somewhat telegraphic description of the use of “roles”
(also called “traits”) in the Moonpig project.
Full details are available
Rx, the Perl Regular Expression Debugger (0 minutes)
I wrote a technical paper about Rx for TPC 2001, which won
the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility.
Full details are available
Strong Typing and Perl (90 minutes)
(Strong Typing Doesn't Have to Suck)
Many people I know in the Perl community have concluded that strict,
compile-time type checking is a failed idea, and that Perl's flexible,
dynamic approach is more successful. But these people are basing
their conclusion on an idea of strong type checking that is thirty
years out of date. Modern type checking systems are not only
powerful, but helpful, clever, and convenient.
Full details are available
System Programming in Perl (75 minutes)
(The Unix Process Model)
This talk is a revised version of Internals of Familiar Unix
Commands, extended to have more Perl content. It is about
the Unix process model and the semantics of the fork and
exec calls, with code examples in Perl.
Full details are available
Things I think everyone should know about Git (65 min)
Git makes many people suffer unnecessarily.
I will help you suffer less, by telling you a few things that I think
all newcomers to Git should be told.
Full details are available
Tie::File (45 minutes)
How do I change one line in a file?
How do I delete a line in a file?
How do I insert a line in the middle of a file?
How do I append to the beginning of a file?
Full details are available
Topology of Data Types (60 minutes)
There is a surprising correspondence between computability theory
and classical topology. Computability is continuity, open sets are
recursively enumerable, spaces are Hausdorff if they admit a definable
≠ operation, and a set over which one can universally quantify is
compact. The natural numbers, being non-compact, can't be exhaustively
searched: given a predicate p you can't guarantee to find a
number n for which p(n) is true—there might not
be one, and so your search might continue forever. But the naturals
can be embedded in a compact set that can be exhaustively
searched. Since this larger type can be modeled on the computer, I
will present a simple computer program which, given any predicate
p, either locates an n for which p(n) is
true, or correctly asserts that no such n exists.
Full details are available
Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus (45-60 minutes)
(12 lightning talks in a row)
Twelve five-minute talks in 60 minutes.
Full details are available
Types are theorems; programs are proofs (60 minutes)
It is an astonishing fact that formal logic and programming system
type systems are, in a very strong sense, the same thing. I
will explain this, with many examples.
Full details are available
Using tie to Escape Feature Creep (15 minutes)
My Memoize module was very successful. As is usual with
successful software projects, everyone wanted to change it. Users
wrote in with requests for all sorts of new features, sometimes with
patches. But every new feature makes the module a little bigger and a
little slower, and after you put in twenty patches that make the
module 5% bigger and slower, you have a big bloated slow monster. That
is bad for any module, and it is especially bad for Memoize
because the whole point of Memoize is that it is supposed to
make your program faster.
So how to accomodate these folks' desire for features without
making everyone else pay the price?
Full details are available
What's a file? (60 minutes)
Of all the many parts of Unix, the inode is the thing that makes Unix
most like Unix, because Unix is all about files, and the inode is the
filesystem data structure that represents a file. This talk takes the
output of ls -l as a jumping-off point to discuss the inode
and how the kernel uses it for essential operations such as
permissions checking, reading and writing files, and the Unix
rm and chmod commands.
Full details are available
Writing Automated Tests (45 minutes)
(I Feel Your Pain)
Why you would want to write automated tests and how you can get past
your guilt and fear about doing it.
Full details are available
You Can't Get There From Here (60 minutes)
Various oddities of computer science, including problems that nobody
knows how to solve well, and other problems that can't be solved at
all.
Full details are available
Return to:
Universe of Discourse main page |
Perl Paraphernalia |
Classes and Talks
mjd-perl-yak+@plover.com