Don't settle for some corporate trainer who can't answer your question because they didn't actually develop the language or use Perl every day! The following instructors all have well over a decade of Unix experience each, plus no less than ten years of real-world Perl experience beyond that. Some are involved with the core perl development, documentation, and release effort. There's no Perl question we can't answer!

Tom Christiansen

Paul Grassie
Dan Klein
Paul Kooros
Anders Lundstrom
Mark Lutz
Nathan Torkington

You are welcome to request a specific instructor, but almost certainly, regardless of when you want to schedule a class, one or more of us will be available.

Tom Christiansen

Tom Christiansen is an author and trainer who has been involved with Perl since its initial public release in 1987. Tom is the owner of the perl.com domain and website, author and major caretaker of Perl's online documentation, original author and co-maintainer of the Perl Frequently Asked Questions list, and frequent technical reviewer for The Perl Journal and O'Reilly & Associates.

Tom is the lead author of The Perl Cookbook and co-author of Programming Perl, Learning Perl, and Learning Perl on Win32 Systems - all bestsellers from O'Reilly & Associates. He served two terms on the USENIX Association Board of Directors and was president of The Perl Journal.

Perl users selected Tom to receive the White Camel award in 1999, the year of the award's inception. Members of the Open Source community voted Tom the Best Newbie Helper in the first annual Andover.Net Slashdot Open Source Community Awards, 2000, to honor Open Source pioneers.

He has a Masters degree in Computer Science specializing in operating systems design and in computational linguistics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison where he also received Bachelors degrees in Spanish and Computer Science.

Paul Grassie

Paul Grassie has been programming in Perl since 1990 and has an extensive background in programmer training and course development. He has over 20 years experience with Unix programming and administration and has been conducting Unix programmer training seminars for more than 15 years.

Paul is a graduate of Dartmouth College. Prior to beginning his career as a technical consultant and trainer, he served as the Technical Director of the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College, where his work involved Unix systems administration, writing device drivers, and software development to support musical applications of speech synthesis.

In his free time, he trains for and runs marathons and ultramarathons, reliably finishing somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Dan Klein

Daniel Klein has been teaching subjects relating to Unix since 1984, and has been involved in Unix since 1976. His experience includes the internals of almost every Unix kernel released in the past 21 years, real-time process control, compilers and interpreters, medical diagnostic systems, system security and administration, web-related systems and servers, graphical user interface management systems, and a racetrack betting system. He contributes regularly to the proceedings of the USENIX Association, and is also their tutorial coordinator. He holds a Masters of Applied Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and in his free time is a member of an a capella choir and an improvisational comedy troupe.

Paul Kooros

Paul Kooros is an author and trainer with over 18 years experience in programming, administering, and teaching about UNIX systems. He graduated from the University of Colorado - Boulder with a BA in Computer Science specializing in compiler construction. Electrical and Computer Engineering were the focus of his further graduate studies. Paul is the co-author of the book JavaScript (with Michele DeWolfe) from Prima Publishing.

As an electrical engineer with Cencorp, Paul designed embedded systems (industrial control systems). He later joined Internet One as a trainer, systems administrator, and network securities specialist. Some of his projects at Internet One were for Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Labs, and the New York Times. Paul's hobbies include designing and building embedded systems, compiler construction, Persian literature, classical music, and (of course) Perl programming.

Anders Lundstrom

Anders Lundstrom has been involved with Unix since 1985 while working at Hewlett-Packard with training, R&D, tech-support and pre-sales. He has been using Perl since 1992 and left HP in 1996 to found a consulting company specializing in Perl training, development and support. He lives in Finland and provides Perl training in Europe and also uses Perl in all software development projects, the largest one being a Web-based Network Management System (~40000 lines of Perl) used by the second largest Telecom operator in Finland.

He graduated in 1986 from the Helsinki University of Technology and the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration. His hobbies include relaxing with the family, squash, table-tennis, jogging and fishing. Contact information can be found at http://www.niv.com.

Mark Lutz

Mark Lutz is a Python trainer, writer, and software developer, and is one of the primary figures in the Python community. He is the author of the O'Reilly books Programming Python and Python Pocket Reference, and co-author of Learning Python. Mark has been involved with Python since 1992, and began teaching Python classes in 1997. In addition, he holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, and has worked on compilers, programming tools, scripting applications, and assorted client-server systems. Mark can be reached by email at lutz@rmi.net, or on the web at http://rmi.net/~lutz.

Truth is stranger than fiction: Both Mark and Tom attended the same university (UW-Madison) and subsequently worked for the same company (Convex). Strange but true.

Nathan Torkington