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

Perl Journal's future isn't in doubt.

[strredwolf]

It was bought by CMP, the same folks behind Sysadmin, so things are very much stable. http://www.tpj.com

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:very good news

[ekrout]

inteligent writing is hard to find in general, and so this is very welcome news.

Yuo kan shore say that agian!

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.

what's wrong with The Perl Journal?

[Dr. Awktagon]

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.

Re:what's wrong with The Perl Journal?

[Chagrin]

Reminds me of a past cover of TPJ (dammit I can't find a bigger image!). The gravestone reads "Edward Estlin Cummings".

Perhaps brian d foy will face a similar fate.

Why go back in time?

[Ars-Fartsica]

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?

[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.

Re:Why go back in time?

[beth_linker]

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.

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:a magazine about all scripting languages

[beth_linker]

If you want a magazine like that, then start one and ask people to write for it. Publishing on the web is pretty cheap these days.

Last "language" magazine anyone BOUGHT ?

[MosesJones]

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 ?

[NerveGas]

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

This contest is most likely already solved.

[Schwarzchild]

See the perl golf tournament on the base 36 problem at perlmonks.org.

Re:my problem with perl

[pne]

my problem with perl

is that it does not use my favorite ASCII character nearly enough "~".

Then you probably aren't doing a lot of pattern matching (or you usually match on $_), since otherwise you're going to use the =~ operator.

Pattern matching is considered one of Perl's strengths (it's built into the language and Perl's pattern matching language is pretty expressive), so that should give you plenty of opportunity to use =~.

Re:Perl.com has carried long articles

[beth_linker]

Actually, at 43 pages, Apocalypse 4 (printer-friendly version printed to PDF via Adobe PDFWriter) is a longer PDF than the entire Perl Review magazine. I found it (and its predecessors) too long to read on my screen comfortably.