Well, I've finished the trial runs

Well, I've finished the trial runs of the Idiomatic Perl course and all the feedback was very positive. Acxiom are keen for me to run it again soon and I might get a chance to try out the Competant Perl course as well.

Noticed a couple of days ago that the version of perlfaq2 in Perl 5.6.1 includes DMP in its list of recommended Perl books. As there are only a dozen or so on the list I consider that quite an achievement.

Oh, and I got home last night to find a cheque from Manning. It's five months until I expect my first royalty cheque, but it turned out to be my share of the publishing royalty from the people who want to publish it in Brazil. So I'm expecting to see a Portugese version pretty soon.

Which will be weird but interesting.

Is it really almost three weeks

Is it really almost three weeks since I posted something here?

The May london.pm meeting was postponed for a week due to a tube strike that didn't happen. We finally got together on May 10th. Most of the usual suspects were there and, once again, a load of new faces. Was planning to leave relatively early, but that just didn't happen.

Web Techniques magazine has published a very positive review of the book. This is slightly strange because the book really has nothing to do with the web.

I've been trialing the Iterative Idiomatic Perl course with a couple of classes at Acxiom. It all seems to be going very well and the classes seem to be very interested in what I'm showing them. We're hoping to run a public course at some point in the next few weeks, but our marketing skills are letting us down a bit :(

On top of all that I need to write some talks for TPC and YAPC::Europe.

I spent the last week in New York

I spent the last week in New York with some people from london.pm.

On Thursday we met ny.pm. Much cultural cross-pollenisation ensured - and some great pizza.

Also on Thursday, Chromatic's review of "Data Munging with Perl" finally appeared on Slashdot. Thisa lead to the usual high level of discussion (!) but for once the Slashdot effect was overwhelmingly positive. Watching the Amazon sales rank over the next 24 hours was very interesting. The highest that I saw it on amazon.com was 86 and on amazon.co.uk it got to 38 (which made it the best selling computer book on amazon.co.uk - albeit just for a couple of hours!).

All in all, that made Friday a great day to meet Marjan and Helen from Manning for dinner. They were _very_ happy about the way things are going. We could need a second printing very soon.

The transcript for the linux.com online chat has just appeared online too. All in all, there's plenty of good publicity around at the moment - it's all very exciting!