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Showing posts from December, 2017

"Parsing with Perl 6 Regexes and Grammars" mega book review

This is Moritz Lenz's second book release. One could argue that you  have to tackle the first one, "Perl 6 Fundamentals" before progressing to this one. This is not the case, however, as the book is written in such a way that it can be consumed independently without requiring any kind of knowledge in Perl 6.Saying that, it does however dedicate a chapter to getting started with Per l 6, just enough to ready you to work with its regular expressions.That aside, the author does indeed go into detail explaining the Perl 6 features used in the examples. A question that I also posed to Moritz was whether the knowledge obtained from studying this book is transferable to Perl5 or to other languages, or, is it rather unique to Perl6? Moritz's reply was that the general skills/knowledge is transferable, but p6 regexes and grammars offer much awesome stuff that other implementations simply don't have. So while the material is only applicable to Perl 6, since its imp

Hour of Code 2017 Introduces App Lab

t's the time of year when the world-class Hour of Code once more commences; just an hour for introducing coding to the uninitiated, having them complete self guided tutorials. But is a hour sufficient? What can a beginner actually code within this limit? The answer is a bit more complicated than that, so let's find out all about it! Integrated into the larger, worldwide, annual Computer Science Education week, this year taking place December 4-10, Hour of Code's novel mission has always been to get everybody coding, aged from 4 to 104, by providing: "a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code, showing that anybody can learn the basics, and broadening participation in the field of computer science". But first of all, why this obsession with Computer Science, in particular in getting  kids as young as 4 to learn to code? The answer is simple. Nowadays code is everywhere around us, from desktop computers to mobile phones and, thank