Well, here are a few ideas, mostly involving a roundtable type of audience par-tici-(say it, say it)-pation. (Thank you)

• Modern CGI security practices, e.g. things you don't find in the FAQ's. (Of course, this could be mocked up into an Appendix to your web course.)

• Commonly used regex's, why we use them, and where they fall apart? (I'd like to see this as a thread, personally.)

• Unsung CPAN modules of my aquaintance. Things you might not have noticed. (Alternatively: What really needs to be a CPAN module?)

• Perl 6 Discussion: Are you planning to use it? Why or why not? Are the Apocalypses/Exegeses helpful or frightening? What do you think is going to be the hardest thing to convert?

• Q&A Time - Where are you stuck? Here's a roomful of people with a wide range of experience. Let's take advantage of them. (*heh*)

• Future directions? What's coming down the pike in your projects? What does Perl need to help you make the impossible ones easier? What can we (the Mongers) do or cover that would help you the most?

I'm sure there are a host of other, possibly related ideas.

--f

Good List. Another I'd recommend is other languages and how to use them effectively with Perl. Or if you're group is fairly open-minded, where other comparable languages beat Perl (think Ruby, Python, etc.).

I thought of another one - Group projects. Look at what NMS has accomplished, are there other areas where your user group could help out? Makes for a good open-ended, productive discussion, if you have an enthusiastic enough group.

You have my sympathy - I know exactly how it feels

You could try borrowing other mongers presentations eg: this old stuff or Google.

You could also try sharing things around by asking all attendees to:

• talk (even from their seat) for 5 minutes about their favourite CPAN module.
• talk about their favourite perl command line switch (or a useful one-liner)
• describe the last bug in their code that kept them guessing

To encourage early takers, make a rule that no one can talk on the same subject as an earlier speaker

I wrote a little about the Sonoma.pm perl death matches a while back. Teams of two or three contestants work best. We had a few team Agilent versus team O'Reilly matches that were a blast. We a team including toma and mikezone up against tallwine and others. It was epic!

It is also quite rewarding for the participants, who quickly improve their ability to solve problems under the intense pressure caused by the audience.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

Hi Ovid,

I guess that it all depends on the level of your audience but I was thinking of something along the technical line of things. One idea which would appeal to me as a fairly lowly programmer would be a talk on the philosophy of programming and program structure in a general sense (rather than purely related.) This sort of steps around the problem of the level of their perl by hopefully moving onto a subject that will contain something new for everyone, even the CS grads - I certainly wouldn't mind knowing more about, say, the distinctions between functional, declarative, imperative and OO programming (preferably with examples, humorous anecdotes etc...)

Anyway, good luck - must be off to bed. Elgon

"What this book tells me is that goose-stepping morons, such as yourself, should read books instead of burning them."
       - Dr. Jones Snr, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade