Perl White Papers
I've just launched a 'white papers' section on Perl.org:
http://www.perl.org/about/whitepapers/
I've set the following as a rough brief for these documents:
Target audience(s):
- Corporate technical managers (may not know Perl)
- Coders new to Perl looking for reasons to use Perl
- Existing Perl coders who are not 'enlightened', e.g. not aware of these technologies and how they make coding better.
Goals:
- Convince someone to try this technology
- Show how many great Perl tools there are for different types of project (breadth not depth)
- Have a location someone advocating Perl can point to, which provides a quick over view of some of the current tools available
Key points:
- Start with a quick overview of what the technology is, you have to convince people to use this technology in this first paragraph
- Try not to refer to 'your' code, it might be a manager reading this - this is not always possible though!
- Do not try to teach the technology, but offer resources which will (references section at the end)
- Avoid dates / anything which will require updating in the future, if possible
Limitations:
- Article should be as short as possible
- Avoid code where possible.
If you have corrections or are interested in writing one of the outstanding topics do let me know.
London Perl developer
Hi
I'd like to see a section dedicated to 'standard solutions', without arguing about the various ways to do things.
For example, articles on Capture::Tiny and Try::Tiny, as 2 clean and simple ways to handle 2 specific problems.
This can then relate back to CPAN as the motherlode of all such packages.
Hi Ron,
Thanks for the feedback, I like the idea of those more specific 'standard solutions', but I'd like to keep this section to the larger topics, and although I'm trying to promote 'on way to do things', that is only to get someone into considering or using Perl in the first place. I'm roughly basing the articles of the larger modules in the Task::Kensho list, so as that changes we'll update the articles.
Where I do see articles like this working is on learn.perl.org... that's one of my next projects so I'll be in touch if you fancy writing any of those :)
Cheers - Leo