Fair point. I had similar comments from barbie as well when I mentioned this on the birmingham.pm mailing list.

Personally I didn't mind about TPJ being incorporated into SysAdmin (I read SysAdmin anyway, so it actually saved me money :-), but I appreciate that there are many Perl programmers who do not use UNIX or do not get involved in system administration.

However, I think that the way in which TPJ is [possibly] being relaunched shows that CMP are adressing these issues:

• It will be cheaper - $12 instead of $50
• There will be more issues - 12 instead of 4
• No need to subscribe to SysAdmin

Another point is that as it says on the TPJ website, if the magazine is published again, they will need a lot more articles. So for anyone who was dissatisfied with the content after CMP took over from Jon Orwant, just write an article and help the magazine to return to it's former glory.

So in light of this, please give them another chance. If CMP pull the magazine again, or reduce the number of issues etc., then fair enough - we'll know that they're not worth dealing with. But even if this happens, you'll only have lost £7.67.

There are some good comments on use Perl about TPJ here. I especially agree with SuperCruncher, who makes the point that TPJ and TPR have different content, so it is not a straightforward case of choosing one or the other. While I have found many articles in TPR to be interesting, there have been more articles in TPJ which have helped me to solve real-world problems.

And I'm not convinced that the marketplace is big enough to support both - but I'll be happy to be proved wrong.

We [as Perl programmers] are the marketplace. If we all leave it to someone else to subscribe, this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

JJ