Client References

Customers

Among our customers are the following who have graciously allowed us to use their names:

VLSI Design Company, U.K.

This message was posted (unsolicited) to a Perl newsgroup following one of Tom Phoenix's classes:
We had Tom Phoenix, via Stonehenge Consulting (Randal Schwartz), come and give us a week long training class, from the US.

It wasn't cheap, but compared with paying for a course from a UK provider it was very competitive. Also, we had someone intimate with perl giving the course - Tom was one of the contributors to 5.004.

Do the traditional course vendors employ Perl experts for their perl training classes?

If you have a group of colleagues to send on a course then it is highly recomended.

- "C"

The 1998 Perl Conference

Originally reported at O'Reilly's conference site by Brent Michalski. The class being described was a one day version of our Packages, References, Objects, and Modules course.

Aug. 19, 1998

Day 2 of The Perl Conference was another exciting day! I spent the day in the Advanced Perl Fundamentals tutorial given by Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix.

Randal and Tom make an excellent team. Randal did most of the speaking and Tom did the technical work but any time he was needed, Tom was right there to answer any questions or fill in where Randal left off.

The tutorial was actually one of the classes that Randal gives when he teaches for Stonehenge Consulting. Normally, this would be a three or four day class but Randal presented it in one very intense day. I wouldn't recommend taking this course in a one day setting if you can help it! Randal did a great job answering the questions from the audience and was able to stay on topic, most of the time. Randal and Tom have a great sense of humor and they were able to keep us all interested by combining Perl instruction and jokes throughout the day.

Randal covered many advanced Perl topics like regular expressions, the map operator, the eval operator, anonymous arrays and Object Oriented Perl - to name a few. One of the more interesting items Randal covered was the Schwartzian Transformation. Simply put, the Schwartzian Transformation is a very efficient way to sort hashes. Here it is, in it's entirety:

@sorted_files =
  map { $_->[0] }
  sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] }
  map { [ $_, -s $_ ] }
  <*>;

This example sorts a directory by file size but Randal assured us it can be easily modified to fit just about any situation.

Towards the end of the tutorial, Randal was talking about Object Oriented Perl. Randal summed it all up when someone asked whether OO Perl was better than non-OO Perl. Randal's answer was simple "Objects are good when they are good." With those words of wisdom, we were let go to gather whatever brain cells we had left and prepare for the evening activities.