The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop

The University Center Quality Inn in Pittsburgh has let us know that they are going to have very limited available rooms during the weekend of PPW due to other events in the area.

However, we were able to secure a block of 30 rooms from them at a discounted rate. When registering, please be sure to ask for the "Pittsburgh Perl Workshop" event rate. For more information on the Quality Inn, please visit our location page.

We will also be working to get more rooms from other hotels in the area.

This year, we're trying to mix some things up with PPW and the talks that you'll see. Don't worry, we'll still have the same traditional talks (in fact, our call for papers will be opening in the next few days). But also, we want to take PPW to the next level.

To reach that goal, we've been working with a few selected speakers over the past months on something we like to call "Things that touch Perl." For Perl developers, we hope this means that we're going to get you excited about taking Perl home with you and trying to use it in new ways. For developers new to Perl, we hope to show you both why Perl is a great language to work with and why Perl is great at working with other things.

We're also expanding our special course offerings at PPW this year. Dan Klein will be returning with "From Zero to Perl", a beginner course which made its debut at PPW last year with excellent reviews. Also, Perl author Peter Scott will be providing a day-long course titled "Maintaining Code While Staying Sane", a course targeted at developers that just had somebody else's code dumped in their lap. We also have a few other instructors that we are working with to potentially provide day-long courses, and we hope to be announcing those soon.

As many of you have heard by now, Pittsburgh has been chosen as the 10th anniversary site for the Yet Another Perl Conference, North America (YAPC::NA) in 2009.

Currently, our plans are to proceed with PPW 08 this October. However, we do not plan to host a PPW in 2009. Instead, we encourage everybody to keep an eye on Columbus.pm. They have let us know that they are interested in hosting Perl Workshop possibly some time in the spring.

The tenative dates for PPW 08 have been set for October 11th and 12th, 2008. The event will be taking place at Carnegie Mellon University. We are currently in the final stages of reserving the rooms and locking in those dates.