I went to see two tutorials – Dominus’ Programming with Iterators and Generators and Klausner’s Web Application Development using mod_perl and CPAN.

I was surprised by Dominus’ tutorial because I thought I hadn’t heard before yet it seemed to be quite familiar to me. Talking to Tony and Andrew in the break it seems that they think the examples in this tutorial had been used before in one of Dominus’ other tutorials Stolen Secrets of the Wizards of the Ivory Tower.

I didn’t learn anything at Klausner’s tutorial which disappointed me. It seems that everything he was teaching seemed self-evident to him and he kept saying something like “but that’s really simple” and then moving on. So, all the stuff I knew before I went in I understood but anything new went right over my head. It was a pity because he seemed to have some interesting ideas about how to put systems together with Class::DBI and Template::Toolkit.

It must be really difficult trying to take a tutorial class at YAPC as so many members of the audience are expert Perl programmers yet there are some members of the audience who have limited Perl experience. The other problem is that the most vocal half of the audience are the Perl experts which can make it really difficult for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience to speak up.