Hi all, I've received quite a lot of heat from people here and elsewhere, due to the fact that I sometimes referred people to resources on http://perl-begin.org/ , in part because it is my own work. In this message, I'd like to note why I have been linking there and will continue to link there, while taking the fact that it is my own site into consideration, and that I cannot be accused of hypocricity for making use of it here ( also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem ).
Now, the main contender for the Perl Beginners' Site is http://learn.perl.org/ . Now comparing between the two we get: 1. The licence of most of http://perl-begin.org/ is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ which allows for almost unlimited use given attribution (parts of perl-begin are Public Domain , GFDL and recently we mirrorred the CC-by-nc-sa Modern Perl book by chromatic). This is while the licence of learn.perl.org is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ which is the most restrictive of the Creative Commons licences, and prevents a lot of use. 2. The coverage of http://perl-begin.org/ is much bigger than learn.perl.org. There are many more tutorials in the tutorials section, and there are many more pages on http://perl-begin.org/ including for some motivation on *why* to learn Perl, for resources about what to learn Perl from ( tutorials and books, including some that are mirrored locally, IDEs and editors, core documentation, collectionsof articles, FAQs and Exercises ) as well as how to get help (mailing lists, web forums, IRC channels, wikis and blogs). If that's not enough, there's also a coverage of platforms where Perl can run on, Common Uses (including Bio-info, chat bots, databases, email, QA and testing, text processing, etc.) and Perl topics ( e.g: date and time, debugging, hashes, references, regular expressions, Object Oriented Perl) 3. We are referring people to the appropriate resources on learn.perl.org where appropriate. 4. Perl-Begin is maintained in an open Mercurial repository on http://bitbucket.org/ , which everyone can "fork", "clone" and contribute to. I accept any input, reports on typos, corrections, even without cloning the respository etc. On the other hand, effectively contriubting to learn.perl.org has proven to be extremely difficult due to hostility and elitism on the part of its maintainers. In order to contribute to http://perl-begin.org/ all I need to do is patch the sources in my personal clone of the repository. On the other hand, just writing a patch to add a tutorials page to learn.perl.org proved to take several days of active discussion and red tape, and the patch ended up beign committed to the repository, in a derived state to what I approved, and without the http://perl-begin.org/ origins and my contributions even attributed in the Subversion commit message (which is a violation of its CC-by licence). 5. Perl-Begin has been actively maintained since its inception. On the other hand, learn.perl.org has been suffering from a lot of neglect and often years on end passed without activity. ------------------------ If you can think of a good reason why I should refer people to any other site besides http://perl-begin.org/ (even taking into account that I am its originator and chief maintainer), then please share it now. Otherwise, I find http://perl-begin.org/ far superior to all of its competition and as such would appreciate that people: 1. Won't have any qualms for me recommending it, because I'm acting based on the Perl world's best interests for recommending it instead of a far inferior alternative. 2. Will consider recommending it to people they encounter themselves, as well as linking to it. It's high time we put the ad-hominem tendency of accusing someone of being selfish for recommending projects that they contributed to, to rest. There are many good reasons for prefering http://perl-begin.org/ over learn.perl.org and I'm not acting selfishly for recommending it, because it actually does rock. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ List of Portability Libraries - http://shlom.in/port-libs Tel Aviv - a functional definition: free parking space-free space. -- Shachar Shemesh ( http://blog.shemesh.biz/?p=435 ) Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
