Introduction

Those of you who watch the Enlightened Perl Organisation’s site, or perhaps follow the channels #epo or #epo-ironman on irc.perl.org (and if you have been paying attention to rantings in this blog), you will know that we are attempting to push/promote/market our language a little more/better. One of the ways in which this will be done is with the Perl Briefing Papers.

So what are they?

The Perl Briefing papers will be a series of short documents explaining or highlighting something in the perl-verse from promotional papers on the language, to short guides or how to papers. They are intended to be two page documents so that they will fit on a single piece of A4 for giving away at conferences/events, in universities, clubs, societies, schools and the workplace (or any other place you can think of). We hope that people may use them as starting points for reference and discussion.

Where will they be?

We will be placing the completed briefings on the Enlightened Perl website under the docs section (http://www.enlightenedperl.org/docs.html), where they will be linked for download as pdf files

Can I re-use them?

A simple answer is yes. You can re-use them or incorporate the writing into a presentation, article, further material as long as you reference the original author and where the original paper can be found. The idea is to have them all available as Creative Commons pieces.

Can I help write them?

Please :). We are looking for writers to construct the articles and there is a style guide (and a template for Pages) on the Enlightened Perl website (and copied below). It is best if you submit the articles as plain text with some notes on picture usage/sidebar text and Mike Whitaker and I will fir them to the series style.

What should I write:

Well, technically we will accept anything, but following are some ideas for articles. If you have some ideas, or the start of an article, notes towards an article then please submit these to us as well. Don’t be timid, any contribution could be a worthwhile contribution.

Briefings:

Note that (tbc) means this article can be claimed to be written, if you feel like you can do this then let Mark/Mike know as soon as possible. (DOn’t forget to submit ideas, and if you want to change a title, discuss it with us we are open to suggestions).

  • Finding Good Perl Developers – Mike Whitaker
  • Moose – Perl OO Done Right – Mike Whitaker
  • How Open Source Benefits Your Business – Mark Keating
  • Your Company and the EPO – Mark Keating
  • Don’t be Afarid of the CPAN – (tbc)
  • Padre, the Perl IDE – (tbc)
  • Stepping Out with Dancer – (tbc)
  • Getting Started with Mojolicious – (tbc)
  • Why Task::Kensho? – (tbc)
  • Start with Catalyst (the extremely brief introduction to a complete MVC universe) – (tbc)
  • Test Driven Existence – an introduction to modern Perl testing practices – (tbc)

Style Guide

It is our intention to produce a series of short documents that fit onto two pages that can be used in the promotion and marketing of Perl. When writing for these please observe these brief guidelines:

  1. The documents should be set in the house style as shown in the Finding Good Perl Developers PDF by Mike Whitaker. This can be done by following the document details (below), or by using the template: Pages template for 2 page briefings. It would be best if you were to submit plain text with notes for headers, images and bold/italic usage to Mark Keating and Mike Whitaker.
  2. House Style:
      1. Page Margins: Left/Right/Top/Bottom 2cm/2cm/2cm/1.8cm
      2. Footer: Distance from bottom 1.2cm
      3. Title One: 36pt Bold – White (CMYK: 0 0 0 0)
      4. Byline: 13pt Bold-Italic – White (CMYK: 0 0 0 0)
      5. Sub-title: 13pt Bold – Doc Blue
      6. Text: 9pt Black (CYMK: 0 0 0 100)
      7. Footer Text: 7pt Bold – Doc Blue
      8. Font Face: Helvetica/Helvetica Neue
      9. Colour value (Doc Blue): CMYK: 100 35 0 35
      • The text should be approximately 1,000 words, between 800 and 1,200 is a good guide.
      • It should be composed around a central “Hot” topic, such as finding good programmers as used by Mike Whitaker (see above suggestions ;) ).
      • The approach should be conversational, avoid being overly technical, or dry, this does not imply that there need be a joke every paragraph, just imagine you were giving a five minute “water cooler” talk to a colleague, and you have the right sort of tone.

      The articles, suggestions, sample text, images and other can be submitted to:

      m.whitaker@enlightenedperl.org Mike Whitaker
      m.keating@enlightenedperl.org Mark Keating