About

About Perl School

The Perl School brand has its roots in a series of low-cost Perl training courses that Dave Cross ran in 2012. By running low-cost training at the weekend, he hoped to encourage more programmers to keep their Perl knowledge up to date. These courses were run regularly for about a year before the idea was put on hold for a while.

Dave always knew that he would want to return to the Perl School brand at some point and late in 2017 he realised what the obvious next step was - low-cost Perl books. He had already developed a pipeline for creating e-books from Markdown files so it was a short step to republishing some of his training materials as books.

The first Perl School book, Perl Taster was published at the end of 2017 (just in time for the London Perl Workshop). The second was Selenium and Perl and several more have followed since then.

If you are interested in writing a book for the Perl School range, then please get in touch. We are @perl_school on Twitter.

About Dave Cross

Dave Cross Dave Cross has been programming professionally since 1988 and using Perl since 1996. In that time he has used Perl as a glue language, for web development and as a general purpose programming language. He is the author of Data Munging with Perl (Manning, 2001) and a co-author of Perl Template Toolkit (O’Reilly, 2003). He has also written articles about Perl for The Perl Journal and Linux Format.

Dave has run training courses on Perl since 2001. He has run in-house courses for companies ranging from investment banks to dotcoms and he regularly runs public courses in London. He is often invited to give training courses alongside open source conferences like the UKUUG Spring Conference and the London Perl Workshop. He is a regular speaker at both Perl and open source conferences.

Dave has been heavily involved in the Perl community for many years. In 1998, he founded the London Perl Mongers, the first Perl Users’ Group in Europe and he lead the group for its first four years. He then became the International User Groups Co-ordinator for the Perl Foundation. In 2004 he was awarded a White Camel award for his services to the Perl community.

Dave owns and runs Magnum Solutions, an open source development consultancy based in London. The rumours about the gold-plated cats were never true.

Recently-published books

Data Munging with Perl

Data Munging with Perl

[Second Edition] Updated for Perl 5.40. This new edition of the classic Perl book contains modern syntax, new CPAN modules and more data formats.

Perl New Features

Perl New Features

In 2010, Joshua McAdams and brian d foy updated for v5.10 Joseph Hall's seminal book Effective Perl Programming. At the same time, they…

The Best of Perl Hacks

The Best of Perl Hacks

Dave Cross has been writing his Perl Hacks blog for over ten years. This book collects a selection of the best articles from the blog over that time.

Cucumber & Perl

Cucumber & Perl

Behaviour-Driven Development is a technique for involving non-technical people in software development. Cucumber is a multi-language tool for …