The Perl Advent Calendar makes its fifth appearance this year, bringing festive cheer to the development community. The calendar, a product of the London Perl Mongers user group, reviews a different Perl module every day from the 1st to the 25th December. This year it kicked off with the DateTime module on Wednesday, following on Thursday with Term::ANSIColor.
The calendar was thought up at a London.pm social in 2000 by Mark Fowler, and he still maintains it four years later. It's also a one-man effort: "It's just me - I can't blame anyone else for the typos. Everything on the site I created, with the exception of the camel image which was illustrated by a graphic designer friend of mine," said Fowler. As you'd expect, the calendar's design features camels, an animal forever associated with Perl since O'Reilly used it on the cover of one of its Perl books.
Fowler has made a few changes over the years, but the principle has remained the same — to point Perl programmers in the direction of a module they may not come across otherwise. Features like an RSS feed were added — using the XML::RSS module, of course, and a link into use.perl.org's user comment system. As well as a short description of the module, there's lengthy documentation, including code examples. He's not trying to supplant the module's own documentation, just to add his own spin. "I'm trying to get a flow going, to show how useful the module is and how I use it, rather than showing a complete documentation," Fowler added.
It's quite time-consuming for Fowler, and like all good publishers things are sometimes a little rushed. "It takes me between two and four hours to write an entry, plus several days to code the infrastructure each year. Ironically, given that I've got a whole year to prepare, I'm always, always, running late. Often the articles get written Just In Time - the night before, or if I'm lucky a few days before they're due to go live," said Fowler. Not that he fancies giving it up of course. Asked if he'll hand the reins over to someone else at any point, he replied "Maybe, but for now I'm having too much fun".
Unlike more conventional advent calendars, you can't open the doors on this one in advance. Typing in the URL for tomorrow's entry leads you to a page that reads "No cheating!"
