I'm quite happy to say that Beginning Perl has now been released. You can buy it on Amazon or a number of other online bookstores, and I'm guessing a few local bookstores, too. There are also a couple of translation deals, too, but they're not finalized, so I'm unsure if I can talk about them.

If you're interested in Perl but worried about the title, the book actually takes you all the way through OO programming and even has introductory sections on Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Plack, and other tools. It's fairly comprehensive.

As some of you may know, I gave a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 about Agile Companies. Due to some miscommunication, the video is not online (yet), but I'm trying to get that sorted.

Today I checked an email folder I don't read frequently and discovered that the survey feedback on my talk came in:

• Q1: Your prior knowledge of subject?
• Q2: Speaker's knowledge of subject?
• Q3: Speaker's presentation of subject?
• Q4: Quality of presentation materials?
• Q5: Overall presentation rating?

--------------------------------------------------------
| Qu |  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  5 |  6 |  7 |  8 |  9 | 10 |
--------------------------------------------------------
| Q1 |  - |  1 |  1 |  2 |  5 |  3 |  5 |  2 |  - |  - |
| Q2 |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - | 12 |  9 |
| Q3 |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  3 |  5 | 13 |
| Q4 |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  4 |  9 |  8 |
| Q5 |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  - |  2 |  2 |  9 |  8 |
--------------------------------------------------------

In short: this is probably the highest rated talk I ever gave and plenty of positive comments. This is largely due to:

• A huge amount of research
• Tons of practice
• Attending Damien Conway's Presentation Aikido more than once

If you missed the talk, I'll be presenting it again at the 2012 Italian Perl Workshop. I'm also going to try to cram an introduction to Test::Class into 20 minutes.

Due to some (legitimate) criticism I received for complaining about MySQL in another forum without bothering to say why, here is my list of my top MySQL complaints:

• CHECK constraints are parsed and then ignored
• No custom data types!!! (This really hurts me)
• No partial index support
• No subqueries on views
• Default values are severely crippled
• Cascading updates and deletes will not fire triggers
• No multiple triggers of the same type
• No triggers on views

Yes, triggers should be avoided, but if you can't avoid them, don't cripple 'em.

Many of these issues force devs to push logic into the application layer where they're far more likely to be buggy.

Actually, if I could just have three of those fixed, I'd want custom data types (with operators, please), sane default values and check constraints.