May 2011 Archives

Welcome to the first Italian Perl Workshop 2011 newsletter. The workshop will happen in Turin (at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Torino) on September 8th and 9th.

Guests

We're glad to announce the first two guests:

• Matt Trout (mst) - Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Devel::Declare, ... developer
• Alexis Sukrieh - Dancer developer

Hotels

Mercure Torino Royal hotel is reserving 25 rooms (single, double, double for one person). The hotel is near the workshop and also not far from the city centre, offers free WiFi and is reasonably priced. More information is available here:

http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ipw2011/accommodation.html

Deadline for bookings is July 30th; after that date we cannot guarantee availability of rooms and prices.

We're also working with other hotels, and post news as they become available.

Submit a talk

Call for Papers is open and will close on June 20th. Workshop topic is "Two Perls", to give relevance both to Perl 5 and Perl 6. We're however open to any "perlish" topic. For instance:

• "Light" Web application frameworks (Mojolicious, Dancer, ...)
  
• Moose
  
• PSGI / Plack
  
• Overview on "Modern Perl"
  
• Applications of Rakudo Star
  
• APIs for cloud services (Amazon, Google, Rackspace, ...)
  
• Reflex
  
• Catalyst & DBIx::Class
  
• New web technologies (websocket, node.js, ...)
  

Submit your proposals!

Perl Course

On September 7th 2011, the day before the workshop, Stefano Rodighiero (author of Pocket Perl) will do a Perl basic course.

The course is in Italian language and free to attend. You can subscribe on the workshop web site or by sending an email to info@perl.it!

A chance to visit Torino (Turin)

Mole Antonelliana, Egyptian Museum, Sacra Sindone: these are only some of the things which are waiting for you in Turin. The city also features a vast choice of restaurant and bars, with a nightlife which is among the most thriving in Italy.

This year also marks the 150th since Italy was united, so the city is bursting with events and happenings.

The city, because of its international airport, is easily and relatively cheap to reach, both with mainstream and low cost carriers. High speed trains also connect it to France, Switzerland and the rest of Europe.

IPW is great change to visit Turin!

Continuando al ritmo di una release all'anno, Perl 5.14.0 è disponibile.

La nuova versione dell'interprete presenta varie novità, di cui potete venire a conoscenza leggendo il perldelta della distribuzione. Sono state variate ben 550 mila linee di codice rispetto alla versione 5.12, il che dovrebbe fornire una misura del lavoro svolto.

Citiamo le novità principali:

• Un nuovo flag /r che rende non distruttive le sostituzioni effettuate con s//. In pratica, si può assegnare il risultato della sostituzione ad una nuova variabile:

  my $brutto = "il cielo è plumbeo";
  # $brutto rimane immutata
  my $bello = $brutto =~ s/plumbeo/sereno/r;

• Nuova sintassi package Pippo {} per definire i package come blocchi di codice, con tanto di possibilità di specificarne la versione.
  
• Importanti ottimizzazioni: perl usa meno memoria e meno CPU!!
  
• Supporto Unicode 6.0, e possibilità di specificare nelle regular expression se i match debbano essere considerati stringhe ASCII o Unicode
  
• Configurazione automatica del client CPAN molto migliorata (yeah)
  
• Supporto migliorato per IPv6 (e tra un po' potrebbe servire sul serio...)
  

Pronti per l'upgrade? Se il vostro sistema operativo ancora non offre perl 5.14, provate ad installarlo localmente utilizzando perlbrew.

Per scoprirne di più, vieni a trovarci all' Italian Perl Workshop 2011, l'8 ed il 9 Settembre 2011 a Torino.

Head First Statistics
Dawn Griffiths
O'Reilly Media, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-596-52758-7
US$ 34.99

Rating: 4/5 (very good)

There are times when you really need something in the area of statistics, for your job (I'm a computer programmer and I happen to need some) or just because you'd like to know more about it. You, however, don't have time and/or find it boring to read about math and statistics on a regular text book. If this is the case, Head First Statistics might be exactly what you need.

First of all, the explanations do not start off from theory, but from practical examples. For instance, a slot machine is an entertaining way to dig into discrete probability distributions. Then, the layout makes everything clear and easy to read (and, likely, also to understand): important formulas are written in very big letters, and side notes with arrows make it straightforward to understand what is what.

Every chapter covers a topic (i.e. sampling, normal distribution, confidence intervals, ...). Explanation is what makes most of the chapter (of course), which is then closed with Q&A answer where you'll find answer to the most frequently asked questions related to the topic of the chapter. As in every good teaching book, there are also exercises (with solutions on the page following each question).

The explanation might not dig too much in depth, ad of course it lacks some of the theory. Nevertheless, this is a fine book for everybody who's interested in or needs to know something about statistics.