Definitely, the video series is a course. And it does hook up onto the
"Mastering Git" video series from the same authors. Content is rich,
very rich. Most of day to day Git users will probably learn a lot on
this marvelous tool that is Git.

But, Git is a tool. Basically a developer (or whatever user of text
files which can make use of a revision control system) knows one or
more languages, and tries to extend that knowledge as far can be. The
Git tool serves him in solving bugs (by i.e. finding diffs which
introduced them), keeping track of released versions, etc. There's a
lot Git can do beyond this, and the course covers lots of these. But
is that knowledge required?

I praise both instructors for their awesome knowledge. However this
course goes far beyond my needs in Git. I viewed the courses 3 times,
without being able to assimilate all this for use in real life (except
some minor stuff as config settings, push and pull options and
patches). This is most probably a logic consequence of me only having
a limited usage of the covered items.

So, in conclusion: the initial "Mastering Git" video series shows you
what Git can do for you in day to day development. If that is enough
for you, you might just want to stick with that knowledge. In this
case, the "Mastering Advanced Git" series might scare you away (hence
this is most probably exaggerated).

If you really want/need to dig further into the world of Git then this
video series will probably fit the task! This really is an 'advanced'
video series.

Next Sunday (5 february), Fosdem 2012 is hosting our Perl booth and Perl devroom. We welcome a bunch of impressive speakers. The schedule is published here.

If you are coming to Fosdem but did not select talks from the Perl devroom: read the text below and reschedule your day ;)
If you didn't plan to come to Fosdem but are or can free next Sunday, read the text below and book your day !
Best of all, Fosdem is free of charge and you don't have to register your presence.

Most talks in the Perl devroom cover specific Perl development aspects, ranging from beginner to expert stuff. If you are a Perl developer, these will certainly be most valuable to you! Check the schedule!

Beside these 'developers' talks, we wanted to show people what programmers actually achieve with Perl. Perl is widely used in a lot of interesting project and we have the pleasure to present some of them to the Fosdem public. These projects have their own community of users, they don't focus on Perl as a language but on the problem they solve with it. You don't need to be a developer to follow the talks, you might share a subject of one of them or may just want to know how Perl projects are started and evolve.
The only required skill to follow these talks is 'curiosity'.
So if I raised your interest, check the following list of talks with their description.

The LemonLDAP::NG Project
LemonLDAP::NG is a free WebSSO software written in Perl and using Apache engine. It supports CAS, OpenID and SAML 2.0 protocols.

Modern PerlCommerce
Interchange is an Open Source e-commerce software written before the advent of any modern Perl. Thus we implemented a lot of things like running a server, dispatching, parameter parsing, session handling and templating. We decided to reduce the source code drastically by using modules from CPAN like Dancer, PSGI and Template::Flute instead of our own custom code.
Interchange will become a collection of a few base modules providing an API for carts, payment, shipping and access control which can be extended easily with plugins. This provides you with a solid, fast, simple and flexible platform for your online business based on modern Perl, which is going to be demonstrated during the presentation.

The FusionInventory Project
FusionInventory is an IT asset inventory solution. The project has two components: the server, a PHP plugin for GLPI and the agent, a Perl program.
The agent is responsible for executing various tasks implemented as plugins, such as local inventory, network discovery, software execution, etc. Its design, resulting from the aggregation of multiple unrelated pieces of software, was quite... baroque. This talk will present the challenge of joining an already existing project, with a legacy code base, and turning it to modern Perl best practices.

LedgerSMB
NOTE : This is a last minute talk, so it is not listed (yet) on the Fosdem site. The talk is scheduled at 12:25 to 12:45.

LedgerSMB is a webbased ERP built with Apache, Perl and PostgreSQL, featuring general ledger accounting, receivables and payables management, budgetting, quotation and order management and more. It aims to be a platform to build businesses on: with existing installs running payment runs of 1000s of items each week it can be considered to be high performance being able to serve larger businesses. With a user community focus, the project strives to achieve easy installation and use to best serve small businesses and single person companies.
The talk touches all of these subjects as well as describing the future direction of development.

Fosdem 2012 will take place on 4 and 5 February.
You'll find our call for speakers here: Fosdem 2012 call for speakers

Hope to meet you there !

--
erik

Please note that the Belgian Perl Workshop 2011 will take place at "The Hub" in Brussels (http://brussels.the-hub.net/public/) on Saturday 15 October.

We are quite late on schedule. So please register your presence and talk submissions as soon as possible via the conference site http://conferences.yapceurope.org/bpw2011/

PS1: As every year, entrance will be free !
PS2: Please forward this message wherever you think it will get audience.

By downloading the course you'll get more than 5 hours of interesting course. The course is divided in well-organized chunks. Each chunk handles a specific item of git, which makes it great for later review.

As it starts by explaining Git as a distributed RCS systems with very explicit diagrams, this course can be followed by a complete RCS newbie. I'm considering myself as an intermediate user and started learning new stuff very fast. i.e. I never use "git add ." since I was quite confused about what happens to the repo. Explanations of this command makes me more confident about using this command since I now understand what this command exactly does. Did you know that "git add . -A" will actually track renamed files? I used to issue "git mv" commands for every renamed file in a repo while I could as well have issued the previous command.

Branches are cheap so branch often! Well I already knew that, but some things are good to be repeated. I'm also using tags, but never thought about what tagging exactly did. I actually didn't care about knowing this. Well, I can tell you I was wrong. The instructor doesn't only explain git commands, but always goes back to explaining what exactly happens in the .git directory. Understanding how the .git directory keeps the history brings a new dimension to using git. I.e. what happens if you delete a tag that has already been pushed to origin ? Never thought about this, but the example clearly helps explaining the fundamentals of Git.

For the more advanced users, the video's about merge and rebase will probably be a memory fresh-up about what actually happens to the repo when issuing this commands. For the intermediate or beginner this will actually look like the reason behind the existence of Git. On of the main purposes of Git effectively being to make merges easy !

The course ends with less common used commands. The existence of commands as git revert, reset, stash, clean and their influence on the repo demonstrates how Git foundations are reflecting reality. The repo keeps clean after playing with commits while keeping in mind this is a distributed RCS.

Framemove is easy to install. Get it from the emacswiki site and add following lines in .emacs :

(require 'framemove)
(framemove-default-keybindings)

Now you can switch frames with Meta+arrows. Works like a charm on macosx !

There's another kind of library like this called "windowmove", which does the same to windows as "framemove" does to frames. Both can be integrated (look inside the framemove.el file for configuration).

Today I even have Emacs start with 2 frames by default ! Tell me about changing opinions ;)