It looks like we'll have at least 4 international speakers at this year's Italian Perl Workshop:

• Tim Bunce: creator of the Perl DBI interface. If you're a Perl coder, 99% chances are that you used DBI at least once. Tim is the architect of this great library, the abstraction layer which allows to communicate with almost all databases using a consistent interface. Tim Bunce is, however, not only related to DBI, but also to several other CPAN modules: the DBI driver for Oracle, Devel::NYTProf, etc. Moreover, he was the maintainer of Perl 5.4.x, he wrote some books for O'Reilly, and he's often a speaker at the major international open source conferences. To learn more about Tim: http://blog.timbunce.org/about/,

• Rafael Garcia-Suarez: lead developer of the current (5.10) release of the Perl interpreter More information here: http://consttype.blogspot.com/.

• Marcus Ramberg: Catalyst project leader. Catalyst can be regarded as the Perl killer application of these years. It's an open source framework for the development of web applications which closely follows the MVC architecture. It features a variety of experimental web patterns, and also implements some concepts which you can find in Ruby on Rails, Maypole and Spring. For more information: http://nordaaker.com/blog/

• Matt S Trout: DBIx::Class project founder, Catalyst core developer. DBIx::Class is one of the more widespread Object-Relational Mappers for the Perl language. More information about Matt is here: http://chainsawblues.vox.com/

Of course, besides these names, there are also many great Italian speakers. You can take a look at the workshop schedule.

So, don't miss Italian Perl Workshop 2008!!!

Programming Amazon Web Services
James Murty
O'Reilly Media, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-596-51581-2
US$ 49.99

Rating: 4/5 (very good)

Amazon Web Services are a constantly expanding series of infrastructure services targeted to web developers who want to outsource parts of their application infrastructure. These services are meant to be reliable, scalable and cost-effective. Especially as far as reliability is concerned, however, Amazon Web Services - together with Google App Engine - have recently been regarded as a bit controversial, due to some downtime episodes. Nonetheless, services such as these provide a gate to the future of the Internet, where owners of small and medium web sites, who can't afford to build some high-quality services on their own, can easily outsource them.

Programming Amazon Web Services is the ideal primer to Amazon outsourcing services. It provides a general view of everything Amazon currently offers, including some services in the beta testing phase, as well as the necessary amount of in-depth coverage of each service.

A programmer who never outsourced any part of its infrastructure might not be much confident using APIs which abstract tasks such as database access and data storage (even though it would be a good practice to use some sort of API also for locally-provided services). To help in this situations, this book kicks off with an explanation on how to think an application, with an appreciated overview of REST-based APIs, remote requests and XML documents and their handling; at the same time, the author tells you how Amazon thinks you should build your application to effectively take advantage of what they provide.

After this introductory part, the whole book is dedicated to the exploration of each service: Simple Stoage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Queue Service, Flexible Payments Service and SimpleDB. Every section provides an explanation on what the service is and how it works, including not only its advantages but also the possible problems which may arise by using it. There's also some API references and, best of all, a lot of interesting code examples. Amazon Web Services can be used in any programming language so, even though the examples in this book are written in Ruby, it's easy to understand them and "port" them to your favourite language. Moreover, there are libraries around which allow a more abstracted usage of ABS: for instance, CPAN hosts several Amazon-related modules for the Perl language.

All in all, Programming Amazon Web Services this is a fine book for anyone who is seriously interested in using Amazon to outsource application infrastructure. Highly recommended.

I Perl Mongers italiani e il gruppo Pisa.pm sono lieti di annunciare il Quarto Perl Workshop Italiano.

Il Workshop si terrà a Pisa, nei locali messi gentilmente a disposizione dal Dipartimento di Informatica dell'Università di Pisa, nei giorni 18 e 19 Settembre 2008.

Il Workshop vuole essere un'occasione d'incontro rivolta a tutti gli utilizzatori di Perl, professionisti o amatoriali che siano, ma anche a chi si avvicina per la prima volta a questo linguaggio e ne vuole conoscere le particolarità e la cultura.

Accanto a interventi nel classico stile da conferenza, saranno previsti spazi di discussione e dibattito su argomenti di interesse, proposti dai partecipanti e guidati da esperti.

La partecipazione al workshop è gratuita, e include un servizio altrettanto gratuito di coffee-break.

Saranno inoltre disponibili a pagamento (incluse nel biglietto opzionale):

* T-Shirt dell'evento
* Gadget perl.it

Per maggiori info: http://www.perl.it/workshop

Fino al 20 Luglio 2008 sei ancora in tempo per proporre un intervento. Qui trovi tutte le informazioni per farlo:

http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ipw2008/cfp.html

Ti ricordiamo che la scadenza per l'invio di interventi è il 30 giugno 2008; inoltre, sebbene la partecipazione sia gratuita, ti chiediamo di registrarti quanto prima: questo ci aiuterà nella logistica!

After some years of unsuccesful attempts, we finally managed to organise the Italian PerlHike. There were just 2 of us, but maybe it's promising for the future. ;-)

Here you can find a detailed story on the event (In Italian language), while some pictures are available at the following links (choose the format you like best):

• Slideshow
• Detail
• Thumbnails

Pictures follow.

It's difficult these days to find something which makes some sense on other video sharing sites such as YouTube. In Current it is quite easy, as there's someone behind it who actually cares for what is interesting to publish and what isn't. Plus, what you send can even be aired on Sky channel 130 if other users like it enough!

So, welcome to Italy Current.Com!

Catalyst
Jonathan Rockway
Packt Publishing, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-1-847190-95-6
US$ 39.99 - UK£ 24.99

Rating: 4/5 (very good)

This is the first Catalyst-related book to be published, and I'm very happy of this as Catalyst is my platform of choice for web application development. Packt seems like a great publisher, as it provides books on very specific topics that otherwise might end up being uncovered by the printed media.

Catalyst is a killer Perl application, and brings MVC web development to a new level. The main other available frameworks (i.e. Rails) try to impose the framework authors' choices on the developer (i.e. which templating system to use, which database abstraction library to prefer, ...); Catalyst simply provides a basic structure, along with a wide range of different choices which play well with this basic structure. This approach greatly improves the developer's opportunities to create customized and high-quality software, but it also has a downside: newbies find it difficult to enter the Catalyst world, as they have to make choices they're not yet ready to make, and so they might tend to walk away from Catalyst, leaning towards a different framework. Jonathan Rockway's book attempts to solve this problem, providing a beginner's guide to Catalyst where all the relevant choices have already been made by the author. This book tells you: "there's more than one way to do things, and this is my way; follow it, and then you might decide to stick with it or make changes but, in the meanwhile, you will have learned Catalyst".

Catalyst - Accelerating Perl Web Application Development begins with an introduction to MVC concepts and with an overview of the Catalyst installation. The main focus of the book is, however, development of applications, from simple to more advanced ones which involve complex database operations and authentication. The book assumes the developer already knows object oriented Perl fairly well, and follows a smooth path which allows him to learn Catalyst and the author's preferred modules: DBIx::Class for the database Model, Template Toolkit for the template View, and a selection of plugins. This selection isn't - however - a group of obscure Perl modules: they are the ones most widely used by the Catalyst community. So, what this book offers is also a series of "best practice" suggestions on what to use. The chapters on testing and deployment are a much appreciated addition.

Not everything is perfect. Code formatting, which doesn't feature any empty line to separate code blocks, might sometimes make it difficult to read examples - but it's minor thing. The part regarding the Authentication plugin is a bit outdated because of API changes - but things like this happen in every programming book. The chapter on the installation of the framework is just a few pages long, and doesn't cover the problems one might encounter - but it points to IRC chat and mailing lists where to ask for help.

All in all, this a good-to-excellent introduction to the Catalyst framework, and great first book on a framework which is becoming better and better every day. Rockway's work is the starting point for anyone seriously interested in building modern and scalable web applications, and in having some fun while doing that as well.

It's quite disturbing to see people who are to be considered the ones who protect us doing such violent acts. There's an online petition which aims to convince the US Marine Corps (who already started an investigation on this fact) to establish a zero-tolerance rule on violence on defenceless animals.

The Art of Agile Development
James Shore & Shane Warden
O'Reilly Media, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-596-52767-9
US$ 39.99

Rating: 4/5 (very good)

There's been a lof of fuss about Agile Development lately. Many folks see it like the cool new thing, the way you must code from now on, but most don't actually know what all of this is about. Fact is agile development isn't simply a new way to code software, but comprises a series of different ways to do the normal activities. These new methods, grouped together, make up a new way of work.

Were my words clear? No? Great, I thought so. This is the moment for The Art of Agile Development to come in. It's a deep and quite complex work from authors James Shore and Shane Warden: the first is one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto, which practically invented Agile Development. The books is complex because it needs to be such: you can't "migrate to Agile" in one day, your team has to practice - as the cover image shows, you need to grow.

First of all, the books tries to make you understand why you need (or simply want) Agile Development: since the path is not straight, but more like a forest, you must - as a team leader - convinced of what you are doing. In some cases, it might also make you understand that you don't need Agile Development, which is a good thing anyhow - and the book remains useful in any case, as it's full of suggestions and practices which can be applied to any working team.

The Art of Agile Development unveils its concepts by teaching the most famous example of Agile Development: Extreme Programming. This particular case of is actually so well-known that most people tend to identify Agile Development with it. The book assumes your positions allows you to make decisions for a team - that's because Agile Development requires a lot of changes in the way your team works. It also assumes you are willing to risk some of your and your team's time and resources in practicing Agile Development: improvement needs some sacrifice.

The books offers and in-depth exploration of each of the covered topics, which you can read by browsing through its table of contents. You are step-by-step taught about what you need to, what results you can expect, and when you can expect them. I believe the last two aspects are very important, as they help you evaluate if you're doing things properly, and they allow you to make changes down the road without losing days and weeks in incorrect work behaviours.

Although there's a main "line", alternatives are always explored by the authors. for instance chapter 6, which is about Planning, in a certain place supports the adoption of adaptive release planning; it, however, explains the differences with other possible choices such as predictive release planning, and tries to make you understand where one approach can work better than the other. You find a lot of other goodies in any chapter: answers to FAQs, pointers to external resources, and especially great Contraindications paragraphs. These will prove to be quite useful, as you'll be able to know beforehand how the adoption of what is explained in a chapter might create problems to your working environment, and therefore be able to avoid troubles.

All in all, The Art of Agile Development is a great book, but it's demanding. It requires you to study it beforehand, then make important decisions, and then try to convince your team about those decision - some of them, at first glance, might seem a bit awkward to team members. You'll then need to apply what you learned in an effective manner. It's not an easy reading, but one things I like most about this book are the "internal links", which simplify the learning process: there are gray text boxes named Allies spread everywhere, which point you to other sections of the book which are related to what you are reading.

If you're a team manager and want to try to move towards Agile Development, this is definitely the book for you. If you don't feel you want this, but still want to improve the productivity of your team, this book is for you as well, as it offers tons of tips on how to organize work in a modern and efficient way.

The set up of Gin Tonics, our brit-rock cover band (but we might begin making music of our own soon), took several months because it seemed we were never able to find all the band members, and when we found them other problems delayed our playing sessions so we were never able to have a decent number of songs to play.

Events have been more favourable since a few months, so on March 1, 2008, we were finally able to play, along with another local band named Close, at the La Parolaccia bar in Malnisio.

I think the concert went quite well, and I have some pictures to share. Here you can view them as a slide show.

If case the above link doesn't work on your browser, you may try this

And... stay tuned for future concerts!!!

Flagfox (click here for its Mozilla Add-ons web page) displays a small icon representing the country where the web site you're browsing is located (the plugin traces the IP address). If you click on the icon, you get location details, coordinates, local time and a Google map and satellite view of the area!

After the Display Mail User Agent plugin for Thunderbird, this is the ultimate time-wasting application for Firefox - but it can even be useful. Be sure to install it!!!

After a year-lasting pause, Italian Perl Mongers are glad to announce a new edition of The Perl Workshop. As usual, the workshop will be held in Pisa. It will take place at the end of the Summer, on September 18 and 19.

Workshop attendance is free of charge.

We're looking for people interested in speaking at the workshop, or simply for talk ideas. Of course, we're also looking for people who just come to listen to the speakers:

This is the official web site, with CFP and other information:

http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ipw2008/

http://del.icio.us/lordarthas

Ultil recent times, I used to install Slackware - which I like a lot because it's simple and clean. However, there are always been things which I didn't like in Slackware: lack of a dependency resolution system in the package manager, impossibility to upgrade the system without actually destroying it, and some weird Pat's choices. Moreover, Pat recently dropped Gnome support from mainline Slackware, and Gnome is precisely the desktop environment I use and install.

So I decided to grab all the relatively well-known distributions and to test them out. I tried CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and many others - but they were all really too bloated in my opinion. I then decided to give Arch a try, as I heard good words about it around the internet and... bingo, I found what I was looking for!

Arch is, basically, as clean as Slackware (if not cleaner), but provides a great package manager with a dependency resolution system. It's also easy to update your system, and there's a nice policy for the updating of configuration files (even though probably not as advanced as Gentoo's). Also, the community is big (and growing), and very helpful.

I liked Arch so much that I decided to install it on my laptop. So now I'm half a Gentoo and half an Arch Linux user. I just hope to find time to contribute to both projects somehow. ;-)

It might be nearly useless, it might even be a waste of time, but this is my favourite Mozilla Thunderbird add-on.

It displays a fancy icon which immediately tell which e-mail client the sender of the message is using. As of today, it has got icons for 564 different softwares/webmails/... It's so fun to browse e-mails to discover who's using the strangest e-mail client. :-)