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Perl Programming

Perl Mongers Perl Magazine 85

Posted by Hemos from the mongering-it dept.
howardjp writes: "The Perl Mongers have announced that they are starting a new magazine called The Perl Review (not to be confused with the literary journal Pearl). Its first issue was published on 1 February in PDF-only format, but the article 'Extreme Publishing' describes the process by which they plan to expand. With The Perl Journal's future still somewhat in doubt, this is welcome news."
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Perl Mongers Perl Magazine More

Perl Mongers Perl Magazine

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  • Perl Journal's future isn't in doubt. (Score:5, Informative)

    by strredwolf ( 532 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @01:44AM (#2949169) Homepage Journal
    It was bought by CMP, the same folks behind Sysadmin, so things are very much stable. http://www.tpj.com

    • but have you read it? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Preposterous Coward ( 211739 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @02:54AM (#2949314)
      It's not just the folks behind Sysadmin, it's been folded into Sysadmin. And I was disappointed with the resulting magazine, at least what I've seen of it so far. It just didn't seem to have the depth and quality of the old TPJ. In fact, my sub is now up for renewal, and I decided not to spend the money for another year -- even though I'm not at all a penny-pincher and subscribe to *lots* of magazines and for-fee services. I just didn't see it providing any real value in its current form.
    • Aren't these the same people who bought Byte and then almost immediately closed it down? Oh wait, there's a webpage now with about a hundredth the content the magazine used to have, so everything's just dandy! Jerry Pournelle notwithstanding, I really liked that mag - it was the only major publication that wasn't in the back pocket of the industry (can anyone say ziff-davis? I thought you could). I'm still pissed that these clowns took it over only to shitcan it.

      Now, I know I'm not an mba or anything, but where's the sense in buying up a bunch of print magazines and then shutting them down? Is it some sort of a tax dodge to lose money, or what?

      As for the future of tpj: it'll come out a couple of times a year, with a couple of articles each time. Yippee...
    • Oh yes, remember, CMP, the guys who killed Byte. They still owe me 60$ or so - they had the audacity to offer me a replacement subscription to Windows Magazine for the remaining issues, instead of Byte. I don't even use Windows - so that was rather an insult...

      So I'm not too fond of these guys.
      • Not to put too fine a point on things, but they've since killed winmag too.

        Maybe they're agents of the sierra club or something, saving trees by buying up print magazines and killing them off. Crazy as it sounds, this makes more sense than cmp's business plan, whatever it is...
  • inteligent writing is hard to find in general, and so this is very welcome news.
  • Take note of the contest at the end: convert a base 36 number to base 10 in an interesting way (ie, short, clever, etc). Sounds like an interesting challenge.

  • I thought now that TPJ was a supplement to SysAdmin magazine, it's future wasn't so cloudy. I've only gotten one bundled issue so far but I think it's doing all right.

    But another Perl mag is fine by me.

    And I must say, Brian Foy's obsession with how his name is typeset gets old really fast.

  • Why go back in time? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @02:14AM (#2949246)
    Its funny how these groups attempt to make a go of old-school once-a-month publishing format when sites like O'Reilly Network, IBM DeveloperWorks, and MSDN have demonstrated that the publish-while-you-go method, online only, is far more useful.

    I suspect that over time this effort will die and Perl.com will become the de facto route for publishing articles that perl users need to read.

    • Re:Why go back in time? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Masem ( 1171 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @08:16AM (#2949762)
      There is still something significantly different about a 'print' magazine vs article-by-article compilations, not only here but in scientific literature, that makes it necessary. A print magazine, firstly, can be held and read anywhere (even with the dream of wireless, wide-band, electronic paper that we can dl articles on the fly, which isn't going to happen for a long time), while you need a net connection for perl.com to read. Second, and more importantly, a print journal should serve to make all articles interesting to the end user, even if the topic is not something the user may have had need for before reading. Having a varied set of articles with friendly introductions into various aspects of program may cause the reader to be intrigried by an article that describes something they haven't read yet, and thus may be inclined to use it on their next project. With articles-as-you-go of perl.com, you read only want you want to read, and unless you're bored, you won't browse articles that have nothing to do with what you need to know now. (Note that this is not always the case: I've seen print journals that have frequnent references to source code, which you would need to access their web site to see, and I've seen journals that don't have a good selection of articles despite their name, thus making the entire issue somewhat worthless to most people.)

      Neither format is directly better than the other, and in fact, the two formats can work off each other.

      So I think that there will remain a happy co-existence between print and online articles. Particularly in the perl arena where there's not a lot of print to start with and many are thristy for good perl articles to begin with.

    • The old-school once-a-month publishing format has some good points and I think that it can co-exist with the newfangled publish-every-day format.

      O'Reilly Network is good for reading over coffee in the morning. I can log on every day and find an interesting article to read.

      But I can print out The Perl Review and stick it in my bag to read while I'm commuting. Doing that with O'Reilly Network content is harder because I'd have to go through the various sites (OnJava, BSDDevCenter, etc.), select the articles I wanted to read, select the printer-friendly versions and print them. But with The Perl Review, 30 seconds of work gets me a pile of reading for the subway.

      So I think that there are niches for both frequently-updated web sites and monthly magazines. There's also a big difference in the kind of content you want for each type of site. On a site that I visit daily, I'm going to want short articles (which O'Reilly provides) and in a monthly magazine I want more in-depth stuff. The Perl Review's biggest article is a 21-pager from Simon Cozens on working with the Perl source code. That sort of feature is way too big for an O'Reilly-like site.
    • Perl used to have an online magazine that, in my opinion, had rather respectable articles (Perl Month.) Unfortunately, a while back the new articles stopped appearing and it seems now that it is no longer.

      I'd have to concur that the new TPJ is inferior. It is smaller and much less Perl-ish. It reminds me of the Java supplement that comes with the
      C/C++ User's Journal...a few good articles but not comprehensive.

  • I'm happy to see this (Score:1, Redundant)

    by EvlG ( 24576 )
    Since it has been folded into SysAdmin, TPJ has pretty much sucked. 2 or 3 articles, once every 3 months is really sad. I appreciate what Jon Orwant and others have done, but TPJ is not what it used to be.

    I wish Perl Mongers success with their efforts.

  • a magazine about all scripting languages (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04, 2002 @03:06AM (#2949338)
    I would like to have a magazine covering
    more scripting languages. besides Perl and Python
    it should also focus on Ruby, my favourite langauge. Ruby is becoming more and more popular and I think it has the potential to become the Number 1 scripting language within the next 5 years. and Perl and Python will also continue to grow. (the losers will be C/C++ and maybe also Java/C# because they are not very productive languages as are most languages which are compiled seperately). so a magazin covering Ruby, Perl, Python and maybe PHP would be a great thing for many programmers out there.

  • Not freebies that are sent to you "for a limited time only" for the last 2+ years. Actually bought from a shop.

    For me its... well not since the internet ramped up from a technical articles perspective about 5 years ago. Why destroy trees or have a big "lump" every month when an incremental approach gets you back to the site every day or so, gives you the ability to search for old articles.

    PDF ? Paper ? Lets be radical, join the 1990s and USE A WEBSITE.

    • Re:Last "language" magazine anyone BOUGHT ? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Monday February 04, 2002 @05:42AM (#2949538)
      At work, we have a subscription to The Perl Journal, and enjoy reading it. The problem with a web site is that very few people are willing to pay to read online content. It's a lot easier to make someone pay $5 to read a magazine than to allow them access to a few web pages!

      Another reason is that you can also control how much the information is shared with a magazine - while 10 of us might read the same magazine at work, if it were an online magazine, how many thousands of people could easily share the same registration - like the oft-used "global regitrations" to the NY Times?

      Steve

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