For years, Usenix has devoted tracks of its conferences to Perl. However, today there are not just one but multiple conferences that focus on Perl.

In 1997, O’Reilly & Associates began hosting The Perl Conference (TPC), typically held during the third week of July in a major California city. In recent years, The Perl Conference has merged with a more general conference for open source technologies, but the Perl track is by far the best attended. For more information, go to http://conferences.oreilly.com/.

In 1999, a nonprofit organization called YAS (Yet Another Society) started sponsoring a more grassroots, less corporate conference called YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference), typically held twice a year in university settings. YAPC::America::North is held in the United States or Canada in June, and YAPC::Europe is held in a major European city in September. For more information, go to http://www.yapc.org/.