Perl Writing

I co-wrote (with Larry Rosler) A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting. It won the award for best technical paper at the 3rd Perl Conference in August 1999. It covers various ways to sort data in Perl and explains the GRT (Guttman-Rosler Transform) which can do very efficient sorting.

This paper was first published on perl.com. It covers various ways and modules the allow you to read/write whole files in Perl. It also describes a new module I created, File::Slurp which is the most efficient and flexible way to do slurping.

This tutorial covers the subject of autovivification in depth. Autovivification is when Perl creates new references when you dereference an undefined value. This is a very useful but sometimes misunderstood feature and this tutorial is aimed to clarify it.

This tutorial covers the hash slicing which is a way to access multiple elements of a hash at one time. Slicing can be more efficient and lead to simpler code. Many Perl hackers shy away from it because they don't understand the syntax or the semantics are not clear.

These are the slides for a talk I gave at YAPC::NA and YAPC::EU in 2003. It covers a series of topics on how to improve your Perl code in common sense ways.