Raku for Beginners

By Bruce Gray

Elevator Pitch

Curious about Raku, but not sure where to start? Or been dabbling, but want to get your grasp of the language on firmer foundations? Then this session is for you! The tutorial mixes explanations of the Raku language with a number of short, hands-on exercises, to let you try it out for yourself.

Description

Curious about Raku (formerly Perl 6), but not sure where to start? Or been dabbling, but want to get your understanding of the language on firmer foundations? Then get a Raku compiler on your laptop, and come on down to this session! The tutorial will mix explanations of the Raku language along with a number of short, hands-on exercises and challenges, to give you a chance to try things out for yourself.

Topics covered will include:

  • Values
  • Variables
  • Basic operators
  • Flow control
  • Arrays, iteration
  • Basic I/O
  • Hashes
  • A selection of useful methods on arrays and hashes
  • Subs and signatures
  • (time permitting) Classes, attributes, and methods, regexes, grammars

Participants should install a recent Rakudo compiler on their laptop prior to attending the course. You can find the latest Rakudo Star release, including MSIs for Windows users, at:

http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/

Those familiar with perlbrew (or who want to be on the bleeding edge) may prefer rakudobrew instead:

https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew

Notes

This tutorial was listed as a 2 hour class in 2015, but was given in parallel with the “game night” time slot, so there was no need for a hard stop at 2 hours. More than half of the original attendees stayed until Patrick Michaud called a halt at three hours.

I have selected the Talk Format: “Class (day long)”, because there is no option for anything between 50m and whole-day.

The Description above is the original text from http://www.yapcna.org/yn2015/event/1754 , with “Perl 6” renamed to “Raku”. The Elevator Pitch is just the Description, reduced to 300 characters.