Re: O'reilly some sort of perl monopoly?

[Anonymous Monk]

First clue was Perl.com is owned by O'Reilly. The domain should be public domain as Perl is open source. Instead it's owned by a specific company trying to reap money off of it.

Domain names, as others have pointed out, cost money to register. Web hosting also costs money. Last time I registered a domain (many years ago), I paid a few hundred dollars for the priviledge of having it online with a given name. Secondly, they release a million books on the topic every few months it appears and trying to be the only books available for this specific language. It's obvious they are trying to be a monopoly for Perl and it's really heartbreaking.

You can always do what I did years ago; as a poor student, I couldn't afford a $50 book, so I read the free man pages that came with Perl instead. Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know (and have been able to tell upon skimming the core Perl books), the information in the man pages about the language itself is essentially the same, if presented in a more concise form.

Thirdly, Merlyn is here and he always links to and posts about his articles regarding Perl on the O'Reilly site or newsletter. I realize this is a Perl community for such information, but when is it that information is no longer information but more of a sales letter?

Who cares? Just because someone advertises something doesn't force you to buy it. Excercise your freedom NOT to buy into things you don't like. If you don't like O'Reily books, don't buy them. I don't buy them. I think they're reasonably good books; well written and accurate; I just don't like learning languages from "How to Learn This Language" type books. I personally prefer a detailed specification of the language features, and documentation on available library calls, with quick lookup of specific language details, all of which the Perl documentation pages provide.

If you really want to boycott O'Reilly, go ahead. I don't see the need. I don't think O'Reilly s a monopoly; I think it's a company that's been successful by virtue of producing books that people actually like. I don't like learning through reading books, but all through university, and on into the workforce, people who like reading tech books tell me they respect the work that O'Reily does.

And for the record, I don't know Randal Schwarz, so I'm not biased for or against him. I know he wrote Learning Perl, uses the pompous nickname "Merlyn", and got into a big legal fight with Intel; like just about everyone else in the world knows.

He's just zis guy, you know? :-)

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Ytrew