A huge number of Perl users can trace their initial coding efforts back to O'Reilly's Learning Perl, now available in its 7th edition. The easy introduction and smooth tour of basic features through more powerful ones made it easy to get started, all with a focus on getting things done. brian d foy, well known in the Perl community and one of the authors of Learning Perl, has launched a

As Mark Keating reported earlier this month, Karen Pauley has stepped down as TPF president after a very successful tenure. Karen served for an amazing 6+ years and did a fantastic job. I'd like to join Mark and many other people in the Perl Community in thanking Karen for all of her work. She has truly set a high bar for the president role. As some might recall, Karen took

I'm happy to announce that Heath Bair is our new Conferences Committee Chair. Heath was the organizer for YAPC::NA in Columbus in 2010 and he has remained passionate about YAPCs ever since. I'm looking forward to him bringing that passion to one of the most active committees in TPF. Please join me in congratulating Heath on his new role!

Josh McAdams is stepping down as conferences chair, so TPF is now accepting self-nominations for this role. This is a great opportunity to help the Perl community and is one of the key roles that can have a huge impact without writing code. You can take a look at the expectations for the role on the "conference roles page":http://www.perlfoundation.org/conferences_committee_roles. If you're interested, answer the questions at the bottom of the

I'm happy to announce that YAPC::NA in 2013 will be in Austin. We had two great locations to choose from, especially from the perspective of other interesting things to do outside the conference. Details and dates will be coming shortly. Congratulations to the Austin group!

Posting the bid submitted by Erica Baum for Austin to host YAPC::NA::2013. Austin YAPC Proposal.pdf

Posting the bid submitted by Mark Prather for Orlando to host YAPC::NA::2013. yapc2013 proposal.pdf

Going to be at OSCON this year? The Perl track will have the traditional lightning talk session along with Larry's State of the Onion. If you've got something to share, you've got 2 days left to "submit your lightning talk":http://bit.ly/NhdLEs to give everyone your 5 minutes of wisdom on Thursday evening. TPF will also have a booth at the expo, so stop by and say hi.

To give a few interested groups more time to prepare and submit their bids for this year, we're extending the deadline to July 1. You can see details on how to submit in "previous posts":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/04/yapcna-2013-call-for-venue.html. If you're at "YAPC::NA":http://yapcna.org right now and you're interested, you should attend Dan Wright's talk "So, you want to run a Perl event?":http://act.yapcna.org/2012/talk/107 and attend the "YAPC BOF":http://act.yapcna.org/2012/wiki?node=YAPC%20BOF.

Every year during conference season, we assess positions in TPF that we need to fill and take advantage of in-person meetings at conferences to try to find candidates. Now that we've worked through that cycle, I'm happy to announce some volunteers in new positions. Josh McAdams is moving from PR to Conference Chair and anyone who enjoyed the 2 YAPC::NAs in Chicago knows he's a natural for this position. Long-time

Below is the latest Hague grant request, submitted by Jonathan Worthington. Please feel free to comment below. h2. Project Title Rakudo Signature Improvements h2. Synopsis This grant aims to increase correctness, completeness, stability and performance of Rakudo's implementation of signatures and signature binding. h2. Benefits to Perl 6 Development Rakudo has continued to make impressive progress in recent months, and recently the Rakudo team, of which I am a part,

We've all seen various tickers like this "deficit tracker":http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/ticker_home.asp which track negative things to raise awareness. How hard would it be to create a CPAN ticker? Something like ticker.cpan.org to show distributions, etc. as they increase. Then maybe specific ones like ticker.cpan.org/Moose to watch distributions?

A few months ago, Nicholas Clark posted "an interesting plan":http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2009/05/msg146785.html to spend some of TPF's money. In fact, it's so interesting, we're going to try to take him up on it. At "YAPC::NA 2009":http://yapc10.org/yn2009/ this year, I sat down with Mark Keating, acting on behalf of the "Enlightened Perl":http://www.enlightenedperl.org/ group, and we agreed to work on something like this: Mark and company will build a web app to manage the

There's been a bit of activity on the TPF Board over the past few weeks, so here's a summary of the current membership: Chairman: Nat Torkington has replaced Bill Odom as chairman. President: The TPF board has approved the "revised grant proposal":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/continued_review_of_tpf_grant.html from Richard Dice to do TPF infrastructure work and a condition of the approval is that he not be a sitting member of the board while working on

I wanted to post a quick thanks to the folks helping out with the TPF booth this year. So thanks to ben hengst Jeff Lavallee, Uri, Josh, and all the other folks who took some time to make sure people got answers to their Perl questions. Jeff is a local and actually got permission from his manager to come down for just the day and man the booth.

As "reported recently":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/07/perl_on_a_stick_grant_update.html, Adam has made progress with his Perl on a Stick project. In fact, he's made enough progress that we're able to offer 1G USB drives loaded with "Strawberry Perl":http://strawberryperl.com/ here at OSCON for $15. We have them at the TPF Booth, so stop by and get one.

The Perl Foundation is at OSCON, so come join us. We'll be in the "Expo Hall":http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/expo-hall and we'll have some Perl items at the booth. If you'd like to help out and staff the booth, stop by or "sign up":http://oscon.kwiki.org/index.cgi?PerlFoundationBooth on the wiki. Look forward to seeing you.

Thanks to Karen and Marty Pauley, we now have a "Plagger site":http://planet.yapc.org set up aggregating yapc feeds. Give it a shot and let me know if we're not picking up your blog.

This is a reminder that the YAPC::NA 2009 "Call for Venue":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/03/yapcna_2009_call_for_venue.html will be closing in less than a month. If you plan on trying to host YAPC::NA 2009 and you haven't started on your bid, you'd better get to it! The deadline for submissions this year is June 1st

The "YAPC::NA schedule":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2008/schedule is up and the early bird pricing of $85