JT Smith

Stephen Scaffidi will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

How many times have you written your own routines to filter a file in-place? Maybe you just wrote a ‘quick routine’ to generate permutations… or parse CSV… or compare dates and times… *shudder* 

How about handling command-line options? Do you write your own code for logging? reading & writing from pipes? Daemonizing processes? Make HTTP requests? You have? *AREN’T YOU A CLEVER HACKER!*

NOW STOP IT.

Other people have already written code that does this stuff better than yours.

Are you still building and parsing filesystem paths with regexes? FOR SHAME.

Have you been writing code to manipulate URLs? Dates and times? Extract data from JSON? XML? *HEAD ASPLODE*

Sure, there are reasons to do this stuff yourself, but face it, they’re all bad.

This will be a whirlwind tour of some of the best little gems on the CPAN, and a few things in core as well. There’s a lot of good, fast, well-maintained and well-tested code out there that can make using Perl much easier, faster, more maintainable, and just plain awesome. This is the stuff that helps keep you from creating stupid bugs, writing horrible hacks, making a mess of your environment and just generally irritating yourself and those who have to debug your code later.

While there’s always MTOWTDI, I will mostly discuss smaller, “focused” modules that provide essential functionality with minimal overhead (where possible). These are the modules that you can reach for on a daily basis, whether you’re writing quick one-offs or mission-critical systems.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]