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"In trying to make programming predictable, computer scientists have mostly succeeded in making it boring"

-- Larry Wall, interview in The Perl Journal, vol. 1 issue 1.

So is this the list of a few who cannot be left out, complemented by the boring ones?

As others have already said:

Where is Ada Lovelace? Where's Larry Wall? etc.

Maybe someone needs to start another list...

I'm most excited about getting a Linux Journal in the mail, and I read each Perl Journal cover to cover, but some other favorites:

DownBeat for the music

Fine Woodworking and its sibling Fine Homebuilding for one of the hobbies

Babybug for the kiddo

At least SysAdmin (even if pretty clueless sometimes as an entity) and Linux magazine are still worth reading. Both contain enough code to keep the old brain cells churning.

And it was so sad that Web Techniques turned into a load of old wank aimed at PHBs - that, and TJP were the only ones I happily paid for.

Anyone else got any (reasonably priced) recommendations for geek mags that still keep the ol' brain cells working?

.02

cLive ;-)

You appear to have misspelt "warnings" as "Safe". There's no point using Safe unless you're doing stuff that needs it.

These days, you should be using 'our' rather than 'use vars'. Plus, you say to avoid globals, but you 'use vars'?

You should learn Perl rather than rely on English.

You should not use Java like variable and function names, except where it matches with perlstyle.

As with most languages, the best way to understand code written in the language is to learn the language. Make use of its features and its strengths. Get involved in the community. Read books, read articles and more articles. Contribute to code repositories. etc.

I just received the November edition of the TPJ which included a fine article "perlcc & Compiling Perl Script".

In short, the filter script could be compiled to C and built to a native binary for a variety of platforms eliminating the need for a Perl interperter.

Poor ELJ. They got "Perl Journal"-ed! :-(

(note what happens when you visit tpj.com...)

Granted you have to have a subscription to get into the website, but The Perl Journal published a really kewl article on converting C to english using a perl script called decss2.pl. More info on converting C code to gramatically correct English is here. The author of the article published the entire deccs program in english in the fall issue.

Take a look at The Perl Journal :)

-Yenya

--

In the winter issue of The Perl Journal, there is an article about how to stream mp3's through Apache using mod_perl. I haven't tried it yet, mostly because the mp3's need to be stored on the server, and my little box is running short on disk space.

Alex

The computer magazines of the 1970s and early 1980s were better than almost anything I have read since. For example, SoftSide and 80 Micro, the old TRS-80 rags, were amazingly valuable sources of information. They covered everything, from useful machine language subroutines to undocumented operating system features to the occasional hardware hack. I still miss Jake Commander's columns on the TRS-80 CoCo ROM, and Dennis Báthory-Kitsz's homebrew kit articles.

For years, these magazines were essentially the only broadcast outlet for source code among hobbyists. You could legitimately put these magazines among open source pioneers -- in those days, publishing source essentially was the only way to make your software available to a wide audience, and infused many of us with a healthy respect for the value of making source code available to everyone.

Not many magazines carry on the same sort of anything-goes attitude. Dr. Dobb's Journal comes close, and they usually provide an interesting read, but they often seem too easily distracted by vaporware and buzzware to be really compelling. The Perl Journal was pretty promising when I last saw it (but who has time to read magazines these days?)