Utah Open Source Conference 2008

It's official: I will be presenting again at this year's Utah Open Source Conference. Unlike last year, this will not be a cooking demo. Guru Labs has given me permission to present an excerpt from our upcoming course, Shell Scripting for System Administration. Specifically, I will be giving an introduction to the Perl programming language. Barring any unforeseen events, I'm also planning on having handouts.

This presentation will be targeted at those who are already comfortable in a shell environment, but have decided to move beyond the confines of classic shell scripting. I've often told people that there is a point in which a Bash script can become so advanced that it is time to port it over to another language. This generally happens about the time the script needs to handle any kind of non-integer math, or do any other kind of real thinking. There are a variety of excellent languages out there suitable for system administration, and I have enjoyed working with Perl for years.

Speaking of the other languages, I'm delighted to see that Matt Harrison will be presenting on "90% of the Python you need to know". Python has certainly become another important language in the tool of system administration, especially in the Red Hat and Gentoo worlds. Even better, that presentation is scheduled far apart enough from mine that I can attend it as well. I also saw a presentation on the list for Ruby, another up and coming language in the sysadmin world, but it doesn't look like so much of a "getting started in Ruby" type thing.

Those of you who haven't registered yet for the conference, now's the time to do it. The price of admission goes up August 7th, so sooner is better than later. Also, if you're a member of one of the LUGs in Utah, you'll want to check with your group officers and see if they have a promotional code for you to get a discount.

I'm really looking forward to this year's conference. We'll see you there!