A couple of times, I’ve complained here about the standard of Perl articles in the British magazine Linux Format.
Following the second of those articles I got into a discussion with Graham Morrison, the editor of the magazine and he offered me the opportunity to improve matters by writing my own short series of tutorials for them.
The first of those tutorials appears in issue 151 of the magazine which will be appearing in UK newsagents about now.
The series is called “Modern Perl” (in an attempt to distance it from their earlier tutorials) and the first article is about how easy it is to write a database application using DBIx::Class. The second article will take the same database and build it into a simple web application using Dancer. That will hopefully be in issue 153 (skipping an issue). There will probably be a third article in the series which will add features to the web application.
I’ll find out what my rights are to the articles and hopefully I’ll be able to put them on the web at some point in the future.
If you see a copy in your newsagents then please consider picking it up. And if you enjoy the article, then please let the magazine know.
So I read the article and thought great! And now I just took the first step, registering for an Amazon key to use the API. And they want my credit card number!? For searching their website to see if I want to buy something from them?
So right now I’m pretty annoyed with Amazon for its business practices and pretty annoyed with you for not mentioning that money was involved. Or have I missed something?
The things that we’re doing with the Amazon API don’t cost anything at all. However, you can use the same API key to access other web services like S3 and EC2 which do cost money.
So I suppose that’s why they want your credit card. In case you use the paid services. Sorry I didn’t mention it. I knew what I was doing wasn’t going to cost money, but it’s been such a long time since I signed up that I forgot they asked for a credit card number. Or perhaps they didn’t ask as I signed up using my existing Amazon account.
Good evening Dave,
I’ve red, appreciated and implemented your “books” db (LXF-151).
Thanks — i finally jump in the the perl lib arena : installing
manually and with cpan…
To the $./book add 0330258648 i did get the following output :
Mandatory parameter ‘associate_tag’ not defined at
/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.0/Net/Amazon.pm line 67.
It seems there’s a third ENV var to define and to ad in the
“book” example :
associate_tag => $ENV{AMAZON_ASSOCIATE} around line 85.
Using : Net-Amazon-0.61, DateTime-0.70, DBIx-Class-0.08195 and
DBIx-Class-Schema-Loader-0.07014.
Merci encore — à bientôt
—
Claude
Claude,
You’re absolutely right. The API for Amazon changed soon after the article was published. Sorry about that. There’s nothing I can do about.
Even more annoyingly, I didn’t notice the change until after I’d sent in the second article in the series. So that will be published with incorrect information too. I’ll make sure there’s an explanation published with the third article in the series.