Top marks to Linux Magazine
March 28th, 2003 by HenA copy of Java Pro arrived at work today. Ordered about 6 months ago I think, we were surprised to say the least. The only thing that sticks out from my reading of a small part of it was a claim that JUnit was an Apache Software Foundation project. QA on Java Pro can get quite shoddy sometimes.
But this isn’t about JP. This is about my trip home, where-in I went into Barnes and Noble, picked up a cheap copy of Nancy Walsh’s Perl/TK book [10 dollars sale] and got the latest Linux Magazine [my favourite mag at the moment, and yet the only one I don’t subscribe to pretty much [well, CPU too]].
It’s great. They need to rename it “Open Source Magazine”, or even just “Open Magazine”. It’s far and away the most enjoyable Java read [despite claiming that with 2 million downloads, JBoss is the de facto standard for deploying Java Web Applications. Obviously not quite got the whole Enterprise marketing scam.] out there. Java-wise, there’s an interview with the JBoss group, an article on Commons Validator and an article on Eclipse. Away from Java, we get articles on Parrot, Perl 6, Optimising PHP and Web-scraping in Perl. All of great interest to me, and I think to any open-source Java-phile. Then they throw in separate reviews of Lindows, and the 200 dollar Walmart PC, a few commentaries and some heavier articles, [Knoppix, Cfengine, Spread Toolkit (which has a Java implementation among others), MPI and linux scripting] and finally the Zonker’s Product Picks, a great section with a quick brain-dump of projects.
Java Developers Journal is definitely improved nowadays, Doctor Dobbs is getting too stuffy for me to bother with, MSDN magazine has yet to interest me at all, CPU is really just a bit of a chat and LJ is a bit too Linux focused. Linux Magazine is all about its byline: “Open Source. Open Standards.”
I love it. [This month anyway. Fickle fickle :)]