Last night was a great start to 2011 for the Memphis Java User Group (memphisjug.org). We had four presentations, the first of which was a wonderful explanation of the mathematical concept of Monoids, a concept in the same vein as the popular functional programming buzzword Monad. The extensive code sample was done completely in Java. Take that Haskell.
After dinner three speakers, including myself, gave talks on their personal learning goals for the year. The other speakers gave a great overview of the categories of NoSQL databases and introduced me to a language I've never heard of before, Gosu. Since these were all local speakers I'm looking forward to hearing in depth talks on each of these subjects once they've gotten a chance to dig into them.
My talk covered two books I received for Christmas, "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" and "Code Complete 2", as well as HTML5 and the hosting service Heroku. Check out my slide deck below.
You can download my presentation slides from https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfbh8pnn_1744h3czrhb if you'd like to peruse them offline.