Perl Progressions

From Hexten

I've been thinking recently about "Perl Progressions". It'd be a (probably) wiki driven site full of things like:

 Currently:

 You use regular expressions effectively and understand well what the
 basic elements do ('.', '()', '[]', '+', '*').

 Try this:

 * use zero width assertions
 * use non-capturing parens when you don't need to capture matched text
 * use the 'x' modifier to include whitespace and comments

---

 Currently:

 You have a source formatting style you are happy with.

 Try this:

 * integrate Perl::Tidy with your editor and avoid manual
   reformatting entirely

---

 Currently:

 You use h2xs -X to create a new skeleton module

 Try this:

 * investigate the Module::Starter family of modules that are dedicated
   to this purpose

The site would eventually comprise hundreds of 'if this describes you then you might also like to try these things' propositions.

My thinking is that a lot of our advocacy efforts (and, yes, I know this isn't the advocacy list - sorry about that) focus on bringing new people to Perl but we should probably now be thinking at least as much in terms of retention. Giving people easily digestible nuggets of skill advancement might help.

The ethos would be something like "do one progression a week until you've done them all - then start writing some of your own"