preaction

Lots of news for the Chicago.PM group! We've got a new Chicago.PM website, powered by Github, up at http://chicago.pm.org. The website is completely editable via Github using the Octopress system. We hope to start sharing resources about Perl on our website, increasing the exposure of the good tutorials and learning sites.

In addition to the new website, we've changed our Meetup URL, so the Chicago.PM Meetup group is now at http://meetup.com/ChicagoPM.

Finally, with our new website, we're starting a project to help teach some topics with more depth, to help fill in the gaps between the beginner's materials and writing useful, maintainable code using the best CPAN has to offer. We've started the Chicago.PM Github Organization, where we will be developing presentations that can be used freely by anyone wishing to learn more about Perl, or wanting to teach others about Perl. The presentations and the code inside is licensed under the same terms as Perl itself, so if you can use Perl, you can use and edit the presentations to suit your needs.

The first presentation we're releasing is about building command-line applications in Perl. I've given this presentation twice now, to excellent reviews. There is still some content that can be added to make it a more robust presentation (especially in the http://metacpan.org/release/App-Cmd section), but it's a good talk on going from "Just read my first Perl book and my first Linux book" to "Wielding Perl to build command-line applications."

We hope to build more presentations of this type in the future, as well as other learning materials as time goes on. Let us know if you want to help!