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

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.

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.

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