The Perl Journal November 2002
What you are reading right now is an experiment that worked. Just a few scant months ago, The Perl Journal's future was dim, primarily due to the high cost of publishing's three P's—paper, printing, and postage. However, there is one thing that publishing's powers forget to consider at times—people, specifically the people who are committed to magazines like TPJ. I'm talking, of course, about you, folks—the people who use Perl day in and day out. You have made it clear that you value a publication that helps you see the simplicity, power, and (some would say) beauty of this language. Consequently, we decided to hitch our wagon not to paper and printing costs, but to what we saw as our best bet—reader enthusiasm. And it's working. The level of support we've seen for this all-electronic, reader-supported incarnation of TPJ has been both dramatic and gratifying.
What this all means is that we can get back to the business of writing about Perl. In this, my aspirations are similar to those of Jon Orwant when he launched TPJ back in 1996.
"Perl is a pleasure to write about: It's quirky and useful and fun. We hope the same will be said of TPJ...We want TPJ to be intricate and interesting, like Perl itself."
Jon is right—Perl is a sometimes odd, but almost always efficient and economical language. We can do a lot worse at TPJ than to try to embody those qualities. (Well, some would say we've already got the "odd" part nailed down.)
So we hope you'll like what we've lined up for you in this and future issues: Moshe Bar rolls his own stress-test application that makes use of the Parallel Fork Manager; Robert Kiesling tells us when (and when not) to use perlcc to compile scripts into standalone executables; Sean Burke presents a very useful tool for converting HTML to an RSS feed; Columnists brian d foy and Simon Cozens discuss, respectively, the Test::Pod and Attribute::Persistent modules, and Jack Woehr reviews Extending and Embedding Perl by way of an interview with one of the authors. (By the way, you'll find the listings for these articles both at the end of each article and in the Source Code Appendix at the end of the issue, where the single-column layout makes for easy cut-and-paste.)
And don't forget—this is your magazine. If you've got a clever bit of Perl that you're itching to share with your fellow Perl programmers, how about writing an article about it? If you have any questions, suggestions, or recommendations for or about TPJ, just drop me a note at kcarlson@tpj.com.
Kevin Carlson
Executive Editor
kcarlson@tpj.com