Perl Mongers Perl Magazine

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."

Comments

Interesting contest...

[quinto2000]

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.

but have you read it?

[Preposterous Coward]

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.

a magazine about all scripting languages

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Perl Journal's future isn't in doubt.

[doodleboy]

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...

Re:Why go back in time?

[Masem]

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.