Fox writes "The November issue of The Perl Journal is out. TPJ is now published electronically in the PDF format. If you have not yet subscribed,
they could use your support. This issue includes:
Re:Is it any good?
dug on 2002-11-02T17:53:23
I think the new issue is worth something.
I particularly enjoyed "Better Documentation Through Testing". Recently I've been working hard to better some of my coding habits. I'm forcing myself to write documentation, tests and code in that order. "Better Documentation Through Testing" showed me some great tools that I can employ to try and keep myself honest.
-- dugRe:Is it any good?
chicks on 2002-11-02T19:06:17
Pros:
- Professional attractive layout and very good production values. It's one of the nicest PDF's newsletters I've ever seen. Borrow your friends color duplex printer to do it justice.
- Interesting content. I agree with the previous poster that brian d foy's article on "Better Documentation Through Testing" was the most interesting of the bunch.
- Mostly free of advertising. I'm guessing that the TPJ folks would probably not find this to be a feature, but I've never gotten much out of the ads personally.
Cons:
- Short articles. The articles should have been a bit longer and more filled out. The code walk throughs were nearly missing or relatively light for most of the articles.
- Only four articles. A third of the 27 pages were the same source code being printed twice. The volume of real content will need to double before I feel like it's worth all the grief we've been through with SysAdmin.
TPJ is a big legacy to live up to and the new crew seems to be well on their way to reviving that bright light in our Perliverse. I'm mostly reassured.
Re:Is it any good?
pne on 2002-11-05T12:08:49
More cons:
- Icky typography. Spefically, the "fi" ligatures and "smart" quotes in inline code samples and boxes (though listings appear to be fine, for some reason).
This kind of thing is a pet peeve of mine (the German version of PC Magazine gets this wrong all the time as well) -- please, people, if you're going to publish a journal that contains code, get an editor (or whoever is responsible for making sure things look right) who will ensure that code samples contain no ligatures, no "smart" quotes (unless, of course, the interpreter/compiler recognises them), and no en dashes where two hyphens are meant.
It can't be that hard, can it?
(Actually, this is the first time I saw ligatures in code samples — so TPJ got it even wronger than ZDNet; their main faults are the other two: strings which look
,,like this`` when they should be "like this" and using en dashes for double-hyphen, e.g. in command line options.) Re:Is it any good?
odincronus on 2002-11-02T21:50:22
You could shell out the money, but what I found to be equal if not the same is just to go to their website and read the Perl information. I spent the money from TPJ to get Linux Journal and Linux magizine, and I am happy to report there are always at least one to two good articles regarding perl in either journal.
