Writing tutorials for

Perltuts.com

by Alex Muntada / @alexmuntada

cc-by-sa

/me

• joined Barcelona.pm long time ago
• eventually became the leader
• organized events to help people learn Perl
• translated Perltuts quick start tutorial
• used Perltuts for one of those events
• found Perltuts was down
• helped vti resurrecting Perltuts
• used Perltuts again for next events

Perltuts

Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi (vti)
started Perltuts on 2012

Interactive Perl Tutorials

Ever wondered what that line would print while reading a Perl tutorial? Tired of reading outdated information? Still stuck with old books? Now there is a solution!

Tutorials

Contents

Ring a bell?

• name
• abstract
• description
• chapters

=pod

=head1 NAME

Title of the tutorial

=head1 ABSTRACT

Short description in the list of tutorials.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Long description in the beginning of the tutorial.

=head1 TUTORIAL

Tutorial content.
						

Quick start

(basic example)

How does it look like?

=head1 NAME

Quick start

=head1 ABSTRACT

This tutorial is a quick start for non-experienced non-programmers. It tries to
cover the basics and does so in a gradual manner.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This tutorial is a quick start for non-experienced non-programmers. It tries to
cover the basics and does so in a gradual manner.
						

=head1 TUTORIAL

=head2 Hello, world!

Let's try from the simple example. This example is a common example in all
programming tutorials and books, it prints "Hello, world!". Try running the
following program, you should see the output.

    say 'Hello, world!'

Here C<say> is a function that accepts arguments and prints them out.

=head3 Exercise

Try fixing the following code so it prints 'Bye':

    say ''

    __TEST__
    like($stdout, qr/Bye/, 'Should print Bye');
						

PDL

(advanced example)

How does it look like?

=head1 NAME

PDL

=head1 ABSTRACT

An introduction to the PDL extension to Perl.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This tutorial is an introduction to the Perl Data Language (PDL) which
is an array-oriented mathematical module for Perl. The official PDL
website is L<http://pdl.perl.org>.
						

=head1 INCLUDES

    /js/jquery.flot.min.js

=head1 JAVASCRIPT

    $('.test').after('<div class="plot hidden"></div>');
    $.plot($('.plot'), []);

=head1 HANDLER

    (function(data) {
      var plot=$(form).children('.plot').first(); $(plot).removeClass('hidden');
      if (data.result.constructor == Object && data.result.plot) {
            $.plot($(plot), data.result.plot);
      } else {
            $(plot).addClass('hidden'); $.plot($(plot), []);
      }
    })(data);

=head1 MODULES

    PDL

=head1 PREAMBLE

    use PDL::LiteF;

    use Scalar::Util 'looks_like_number';

    sub plot {
        my @datasets = @_;
        my @output_datasets;
        for my $dataset (@datasets) {
            # ...
        }
        return +{plot => \@output_datasets};
    }
						

=head1 TUTORIAL

=head2 Simple Plotting

This tutorial uses a custom javascript plotting system built on the Flot 
library (L<http://code.google.com/p/flot/>). The plotting interface
provided by C<perltuts.com> is still under heavy development and
may change. 

The C<plot> command accepts a list of datasets to be plotted.
Valid datasets include a simple arrayref of y values (x values will be
generated),

    plot([1, 2, 3]);
						

Summary

NAME

Title of the tutorial.

ABSTRACT

Short description in the list of tutorials.

DESCRIPTION

Long description at the beginning of the tutorial.

INCLUDES

External script element to load javascript code.

JAVASCRIPT

Embedded javascript code.

HANDLER

Javascript code to handle the data produced in Perl (e.g. plot).

MODULES

Perl distributions needed to run the code.

PREAMBLE

Perl code to run before tutorial code.

TUTORIAL

The contents of the tutorial.

=head2

Chapter titles listed in the table of contents.

For everything else...

POD syntax

• text
• code blocks
• lists
• links
• text decoration
• etc.

and

__TEST__

Thanks

Questions?

Are tutorials publicly available?

https://github.com/vti/perltuts.com-tutorials

How does it work?

(all logos are from Wikipedia, cc-by-sa)