Introductory Perl Book temporarily free online

[foxfirefey]

I've heard some people lately saying they'd like to learn Perl recently, and rb mentioned in IRC that this work-in-progress book is temporarily available for free online:

Beginning Perl (Wrox)

There might be a few errors still to be fixed, but overall it could be a good resource.

Introduction to git talk; Pro Git book

[denise]

This morning at YAPC I attended an Intro to Git session presented by Randal Schwartz. It was an awesome session! I learned a lot about git and how it works (and how you shouldn't try to make it work). I was typing up notes to post for y'all, and then he mentioned at the end that he has both the slides and a video of the presentation (a version he gave in January) available online.

So, if you have a spare two hours and would like to learn about git, here you go:

Introduction to Git - video
Introduction to Git - slides

There's also a book that many people have highly recommended, called Pro Git by Scott Chacon. It's available free of charge in many formats, licensed as CC-BY-SA-NC.

I definitely felt much more comfortable with the idea of what git is, how it works, and why it does what it does when I finished the session, so if you're feeling anxious about the migration to github (which is a service layered on top of git, the underlying software), definitely check it out.

update-db and the -r flag

[mark]

Hi all,

This is important. Please note!

If you are going to be touching bin/upgrading/update-db-general.pl (and related scripts) -- you must respect the way this script works -- i.e., this script should never make any changes unless the -r flag is provided or it prompts the user running it.

This script is designed to be run by admins before code pushes, and it's supposed to spit out the "this is what I'm going to do" information. That way the admin can run it to see what might happen before it happens. It's not safe to just have it execute SQL without that flag.

This is a safety issue. I just ran it on production and it made some changes (regarding fixing certain edges) without warning me or requiring me to use the run flag. That's scary. :)

Thanks!