TPJ & 101 articles

johanvdb on 2003-03-17T11:55:53

I read the TPJ from march this weekend and it carried a good collection of articles this time. The article about fractal images and music was very amusing. The articles about high performance computing in Perl (Moshe Bar) and how to minimize structural code (Simon Cozens) are really very interesting. It is a pity that the magazine is not any bigger, the articles are of a good standard, but are all way too short...

An advertisement in the new TPJ pointed to a collection of 101 articles about Perl. You could buy them for 10$. The articles come from various sources (TPJ, web review, web techniques, ...). I bought the article series, but I've to say it is a bit a disappointement ... although the articles are very good and are worth a place in your Perl-doc collection. The point is that only the text of the articles is included, no images at all ...

Johan

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Simon's article

ajtaylor on 2003-03-17T20:33:56

I liked Simon's article so much I went and installed Config::Auto for a personal project. It has some annoying dependencies (like XML::Simple for parsing XML config files - something I'll never use) but other than that It Just Works. I really like parse() just gives you a hash ref. Simple, quick, easy to pass around, and no API to learn. :-)

One note though: the current version on CPAN doesn't work with 5.6.0 for some reason. I grabbed the latest from CVS (per Simon's tip) and it all worked beautifully. The error was from "@$foo_aref" =~ tr/;// and said something about can't modify a string. The fix is just to create the string in a separate line:
my $str = "@$foo"; $str =~ tr/;//;