CPAN Modules

CPAN is Perl's killer app, offering literally thousands of modules.

4.0.2.1 | Spans and Sets

A lightning presentation on CPAN modules that help you handle spans and sets. This is of interest to those of you who work with objects with spatial coordinates (clones, contigs, alignments, etc) or objects identified by an index set (array probes, ordered features, etc). Focus will be on demonstrating how to use the Set::IntSpan module to calculate coverage and coverage gaps and to find runs in probe sets. Other CPAN modules that implement sets and multisets will be mentioned.

4.1.2.2 | Random Numbers and Distributions

Computers are fast but they're lousy in simulating randomness - an oxymoron in its own right. We will see that random numbers generated by Perl's rand() are actually pseudo-random (PRN) and form a reproducible, seeded sequence. We'll briefly cover linear congruential generators (LCG), one way to create PRNs and talk about their strengths and weaknesses. A brief mention of sub-random sequences will be made in context of even space filling. We'll see how to make use of CPAN modules to harness a variety of PRN algorithms in Perl, including the reliable Mersenne Twister. We'll also spend time looking at how uniform random values are used to generate values distributed according to an arbitrary distributions.

course codes

Courses are labeled by a unique Perl Workshop code. The code has the format category . course . level . sessions [.session].

• category represents the broad topic area covered by the course
• course is a unique course identifier within a given category
• level encodes the level of difficulty from 0 (all) to 3 (advanced)
• sessions gives the number of lectures in the course
• .session is an optional session index field which is used when the code refers to a sessions; for example 1.0.1.8 encodes "Introduction to Perl" but 1.0.1.8.2 refers to the second session in the course.

All code components are zero-indexed except for the final optional session index.

course levels

level 0 | all

level 1 | beginner

level 2 | intermediate

level 3 | advanced