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NAME
       perlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl

DESCRIPTION
       This section of the FAQ answers questions about where to
       find source and documentation for Perl, support, and
       related matters.

   What machines support perl?  Where do I get it?
       The standard release of perl (the one maintained by the
       perl development team) is distributed only in source code
       form.  You can find the latest releases at
       http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html .

       Perl builds and runs on a bewildering number of platforms.
       Virtually all known and current Unix derivatives are
       supported (perl's native platform), as are other systems
       like VMS, DOS, OS/2, Windows, QNX, BeOS, OS X, MPE/iX and
       the Amiga.

       Binary distributions for some proprietary platforms can be
       found http://www.cpan.org/ports/ directory. Because these
       are not part of the standard distribution, they may and in
       fact do differ from the base perl port in a variety of
       ways. You'll have to check their respective release notes
       to see just what the differences are.  These differences
       can be either positive (e.g. extensions for the features
       of the particular platform that are not supported in the
       source release of perl) or negative (e.g. might be based
       upon a less current source release of perl).

   How can I get a binary version of perl?
       (contributed by brian d foy)

       ActiveState: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and
       HP-UX

               http://www.activestate.com/

       Sunfreeware.com: Solaris 2.5 to Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)

               http://www.sunfreeware.com/

       Strawberry Perl: Windows, Perl 5.8.8 and 5.10.0

               http://www.strawberryperl.com

       IndigoPerl: Windows

               http://indigostar.com/

   I don't have a C compiler. How can I build my own Perl
       interpreter?
       Since you don't have a C compiler, you're doomed and your



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       vendor should be sacrificed to the Sun gods.  But that
       doesn't help you.

       What you need to do is get a binary version of gcc for
       your system first.  Consult the Usenet FAQs for your
       operating system for information on where to get such a
       binary version.

       You might look around the net for a pre-built binary of
       Perl (or a C compiler!) that meets your needs, though:

       For Windows, Vanilla Perl ( http://vanillaperl.com/ ) and
       Strawberry Perl ( http://strawberryperl.com/ ) come with a
       bundled C compiler. ActivePerl is a pre-compiled version
       of Perl ready-to-use.

       For Sun systems, SunFreeware.com provides binaries of most
       popular applications, including compilers and Perl.

   I copied the perl binary from one machine to another, but
       scripts don't work.
       That's probably because you forgot libraries, or library
       paths differ.  You really should build the whole
       distribution on the machine it will eventually live on,
       and then type "make install".  Most other approaches are
       doomed to failure.

       One simple way to check that things are in the right place
       is to print out the hard-coded @INC that perl looks
       through for libraries:

           % perl -le 'print for @INC'

       If this command lists any paths that don't exist on your
       system, then you may need to move the appropriate
       libraries to these locations, or create symbolic links,
       aliases, or shortcuts appropriately.  @INC is also printed
       as part of the output of

           % perl -V

       You might also want to check out "How do I keep my own
       module/library directory?" in perlfaq8.

   I grabbed the sources and tried to compile but gdbm/dynamic
       loading/malloc/linking/... failed.  How do I make it work?
       Read the INSTALL file, which is part of the source
       distribution.  It describes in detail how to cope with
       most idiosyncrasies that the Configure script can't work
       around for any given system or architecture.

   What modules and extensions are available for Perl?  What is
       CPAN?  What does CPAN/src/... mean?
       CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a



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       multi-gigabyte archive replicated on hundreds of machines
       all over the world. CPAN contains source code, non-native
       ports, documentation, scripts, and many third-party
       modules and extensions, designed for everything from
       commercial database interfaces to keyboard/screen control
       to web walking and CGI scripts. The master web site for
       CPAN is http://www.cpan.org/ and there is the CPAN
       Multiplexer at http://www.cpan.org/CPAN.html which will
       choose a mirror near you via DNS.  See
       http://www.perl.com/CPAN (without a slash at the end) for
       how this process works. Also, http://mirror.cpan.org/ has
       a nice interface to the http://www.cpan.org/MIRRORED.BY
       mirror directory.

       See the CPAN FAQ at http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html
       for answers to the most frequently asked questions about
       CPAN including how to become a mirror.

       CPAN/path/... is a naming convention for files available
       on CPAN sites.  CPAN indicates the base directory of a
       CPAN mirror, and the rest of the path is the path from
       that directory to the file. For instance, if you're using
       ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN as your CPAN
       site, the file CPAN/misc/japh is downloadable as
       ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/misc/japh .

       Considering that, as of 2006, there are over ten thousand
       existing modules in the archive, one probably exists to do
       nearly anything you can think of. Current categories under
       CPAN/modules/by-category/ include Perl core modules;
       development support; operating system interfaces;
       networking, devices, and interprocess communication; data
       type utilities; database interfaces; user interfaces;
       interfaces to other languages; filenames, file systems,
       and file locking; internationalization and locale; world
       wide web support; server and daemon utilities; archiving
       and compression; image manipulation; mail and news;
       control flow utilities; filehandle and I/O; Microsoft
       Windows modules; and miscellaneous modules.

       See http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html or
       http://search.cpan.org/ for a more complete list of
       modules by category.

       CPAN is a free service and is not affiliated with O'Reilly
       Media.

   Is there an ISO or ANSI certified version of Perl?
       Certainly not.  Larry expects that he'll be certified
       before Perl is.

   Where can I get information on Perl?
       The complete Perl documentation is available with the Perl
       distribution.  If you have Perl installed locally, you



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       probably have the documentation installed as well: type
       "man perl" if you're on a system resembling Unix.  This
       will lead you to other important man pages, including how
       to set your $MANPATH.  If you're not on a Unix system,
       access to the documentation will be different; for
       example, documentation might only be in HTML format.  All
       proper perl installations have fully-accessible
       documentation.

       You might also try "perldoc perl" in case your system
       doesn't have a proper man command, or it's been
       misinstalled.  If that doesn't work, try looking in
       /usr/local/lib/perl5/pod for documentation.

       If all else fails, consult http://perldoc.perl.org/ which
       has the complete documentation in HTML and PDF format.

       Many good books have been written about Perl--see the
       section later in perlfaq2 for more details.

       Tutorial documents are included in current or upcoming
       Perl releases include perltoot for objects or perlboot for
       a beginner's approach to objects, perlopentut for file
       opening semantics, perlreftut for managing references,
       perlretut for regular expressions, perlthrtut for threads,
       perldebtut for debugging, and perlxstut for linking C and
       Perl together.  There may be more by the time you read
       this.  These URLs might also be useful:

           http://perldoc.perl.org/
           http://bookmarks.cpan.org/search.cgi?cat=Training%2FTutorials

   What are the Perl newsgroups on Usenet?  Where do I post
       questions?
       Several groups devoted to the Perl language are on Usenet:

               comp.lang.perl.announce      Moderated announcement group
               comp.lang.perl.misc          High traffic general Perl discussion
               comp.lang.perl.moderated     Moderated discussion group
               comp.lang.perl.modules       Use and development of Perl modules
               comp.lang.perl.tk            Using Tk (and X) from Perl

       Some years ago, comp.lang.perl was divided into those
       groups, and comp.lang.perl itself officially removed.
       While that group may still be found on some news servers,
       it is unwise to use it, because postings there will not
       appear on news servers which honour the official list of
       group names.  Use comp.lang.perl.misc for topics which do
       not have a more-appropriate specific group.

       There is also a Usenet gateway to Perl mailing lists
       sponsored by perl.org at nntp://nntp.perl.org , a web
       interface to the same lists at http://nntp.perl.org/group/
       and these lists are also available under the "perl.*"



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       hierarchy at http://groups.google.com . Other groups are
       listed at http://lists.perl.org/ ( also known as
       http://lists.cpan.org/ ).

       A nice place to ask questions is the PerlMonks site,
       http://www.perlmonks.org/ , or the Perl Beginners mailing
       list http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=beginners .

       Note that none of the above are supposed to write your
       code for you: asking questions about particular problems
       or general advice is fine, but asking someone to write
       your code for free is not very cool.

   Where should I post source code?
       You should post source code to whichever group is most
       appropriate, but feel free to cross-post to
       comp.lang.perl.misc.  If you want to cross-post to
       alt.sources, please make sure it follows their posting
       standards, including setting the Followup-To header line
       to NOT include alt.sources; see their FAQ (
       http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-sources-intro/ ) for details.

       If you're just looking for software, first use Google (
       http://www.google.com ), Google's usenet search interface
       ( http://groups.google.com ),  and CPAN Search (
       http://search.cpan.org ).  This is faster and more
       productive than just posting a request.

   Perl Books
       A number of books on Perl and/or CGI programming are
       available.  A few of these are good, some are OK, but many
       aren't worth your money.  There is a list of these books,
       some with extensive reviews, at http://books.perl.org/ .
       If you don't see your book listed here, you can write to
       perlfaq-workers@perl.org .

       The incontestably definitive reference book on Perl,
       written by the creator of Perl, is Programming Perl:

               Programming Perl (the "Camel Book"):
               by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
               ISBN 0-596-00027-8  [3rd edition July 2000]
               http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
               (English, translations to several languages are also available)

       The companion volume to the Camel containing thousands of
       real-world examples, mini-tutorials, and complete programs
       is:

               The Perl Cookbook (the "Ram Book"):
               by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington,
                   with Foreword by Larry Wall
               ISBN 0-596-00313-7 [2nd Edition August 2003]
               http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlckbk2/



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       If you're already a seasoned programmer, then the Camel
       Book might suffice for you to learn Perl.  If you're not,
       check out the Llama book:

               Learning Perl
               by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy
               ISBN 0-596-10105-8 [4th edition July 2005]
               http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/

       And for more advanced information on writing larger
       programs, presented in the same style as the Llama book,
       continue your education with the Alpaca book:

               Intermediate Perl (the "Alpaca Book")
               by Randal L. Schwartz and brian d foy, with Tom Phoenix (foreword by Damian Conway)
               ISBN 0-596-10206-2 [1st edition March 2006]
               http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lrnperlorm/

       Addison-Wesley ( http://www.awlonline.com/ ) and Manning (
       http://www.manning.com/ ) are also publishers of some fine
       Perl books such as Object Oriented Programming with Perl
       by Damian Conway and Network Programming with Perl by
       Lincoln Stein.

       An excellent technical book discounter is Bookpool at
       http://www.bookpool.com/ where a 30% discount or more is
       not unusual.

       What follows is a list of the books that the FAQ authors
       found personally useful.  Your mileage may (but, we hope,
       probably won't) vary.

       Recommended books on (or mostly on) Perl follow.

       References
                   Programming Perl
                   by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
                   ISBN 0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/

                   Perl 5 Pocket Reference
                   by Johan Vromans
                   ISBN 0-596-00374-9 [4th edition July 2002]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlpr4/

       Tutorials
                   Beginning Perl
                   by James Lee
                   ISBN 1-59059-391-X [2nd edition August 2004]
                   http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=344

                   Elements of Programming with Perl
                   by Andrew L. Johnson
                   ISBN 1-884777-80-5 [1st edition October 1999]



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                   http://www.manning.com/johnson/

                   Learning Perl
                   by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy
                   ISBN 0-596-52010-7 [5th edition June 2008]
                   http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596520106/

                   Intermediate Perl (the "Alpaca Book")
                   by Randal L. Schwartz and brian d foy, with Tom Phoenix (foreword by Damian Conway)
                   ISBN 0-596-10206-2 [1st edition March 2006]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/intermediateperl/

                   Mastering Perl
                   by brian d foy
                   ISBN 0-596-52724-1 [1st edition July 2007]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527242/

       Task-Oriented
                   Writing Perl Modules for CPAN
                   by Sam Tregar
                   ISBN 1-59059-018-X [1st edition Aug 2002]
                   http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=14

                   The Perl Cookbook
                   by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
                       with foreword by Larry Wall
                   ISBN 1-56592-243-3 [1st edition August 1998]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cookbook/

                   Effective Perl Programming
                   by Joseph Hall
                   ISBN 0-201-41975-0 [1st edition 1998]
                   http://www.awl.com/

                   Real World SQL Server Administration with Perl
                   by Linchi Shea
                   ISBN 1-59059-097-X [1st edition July 2003]
                   http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=171

       Special Topics
                   Perl Best Practices
                   by Damian Conway
                   ISBN: 0-596-00173-8 [1st edition July 2005]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlbp/

                   Higher Order Perl
                   by Mark-Jason Dominus
                   ISBN: 1558607013 [1st edition March 2005]
                   http://hop.perl.plover.com/

                   Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5
                   by Scott Walters
                   ISBN 1-59059-395-2 [1st edition December 2004]
                   http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=355



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                   Mastering Regular Expressions
                   by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
                   ISBN 0-596-00289-0 [2nd edition July 2002]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/

                   Network Programming with Perl
                   by Lincoln Stein
                   ISBN 0-201-61571-1 [1st edition 2001]
                   http://www.awlonline.com/

                   Object Oriented Perl
                   Damian Conway
                       with foreword by Randal L. Schwartz
                   ISBN 1-884777-79-1 [1st edition August 1999]
                   http://www.manning.com/conway/

                   Data Munging with Perl
                   Dave Cross
                   ISBN 1-930110-00-6 [1st edition 2001]
                   http://www.manning.com/cross

                   Mastering Perl/Tk
                   by Steve Lidie and Nancy Walsh
                   ISBN 1-56592-716-8 [1st edition January 2002]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mastperltk/

                   Extending and Embedding Perl
                   by Tim Jenness and Simon Cozens
                   ISBN 1-930110-82-0 [1st edition August 2002]
                   http://www.manning.com/jenness

                   Perl Debugger Pocket Reference
                   by Richard Foley
                   ISBN 0-596-00503-2 [1st edition January 2004]
                   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perldebugpr/

                   Pro Perl Debugging
                   by Richard Foley with Andy Lester
                   ISBN 1-59059-454-1 [1st edition July 2005]
                   http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590594541

   Which magazines have Perl content?
       The Perl Review ( http://www.theperlreview.com ) focuses
       on Perl almost completely (although it sometimes sneaks in
       an article about another language). There's also $foo
       Magazin, a german magazine dedicated to Perl, at (
       http://www.foo-magazin.de ).

       Magazines that frequently carry quality articles on Perl
       include The Perl Review ( http://www.theperlreview.com ),
       Unix Review ( http://www.unixreview.com/ ), Linux Magazine
       ( http://www.linuxmagazine.com/ ), and Usenix's
       newsletter/magazine to its members, login: (



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       http://www.usenix.org/ )

       The Perl columns of Randal L. Schwartz are available on
       the web at http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/
       , http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/UnixReview/ , and
       http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/ .

       The first (and for a long time, only) periodical devoted
       to All Things Perl, The Perl Journal contains tutorials,
       demonstrations, case studies, announcements, contests, and
       much more.  TPJ has columns on web development, databases,
       Win32 Perl, graphical programming, regular expressions,
       and networking, and sponsors the Obfuscated Perl Contest
       and the Perl Poetry Contests.  Beginning in November 2002,
       TPJ moved to a reader-supported monthly e-zine format in
       which subscribers can download issues as PDF documents. In
       2006, TPJ merged with Dr.  Dobbs Journal (online edition).
       To read old TPJ articles, see http://www.ddj.com/ .

   What mailing lists are there for Perl?
       Most of the major modules (Tk, CGI, libwww-perl) have
       their own mailing lists.  Consult the documentation that
       came with the module for subscription information.

       A comprehensive list of Perl related mailing lists can be
       found at:

               http://lists.perl.org/

   Where are the archives for comp.lang.perl.misc?
       The Google search engine now carries archived and
       searchable newsgroup content.

       http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/topics

       If you have a question, you can be sure someone has
       already asked the same question at some point on c.l.p.m.
       It requires some time and patience to sift through all the
       content but often you will find the answer you seek.

   Where can I buy a commercial version of perl?
       In a real sense, perl already is commercial software: it
       has a license that you can grab and carefully read to your
       manager. It is distributed in releases and comes in well-
       defined packages. There is a very large user community and
       an extensive literature.  The comp.lang.perl.*  newsgroups
       and several of the mailing lists provide free answers to
       your questions in near real-time.  Perl has traditionally
       been supported by Larry, scores of software designers and
       developers, and myriad programmers, all working for free
       to create a useful thing to make life better for everyone.

       However, these answers may not suffice for managers who
       require a purchase order from a company whom they can sue



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       should anything go awry.  Or maybe they need very serious
       hand-holding and contractual obligations.  Shrink-wrapped
       CDs with perl on them are available from several sources
       if that will help.  For example, many Perl books include a
       distribution of perl, as do the O'Reilly Perl Resource
       Kits (in both the Unix flavor and in the proprietary
       Microsoft flavor); the free Unix distributions also all
       come with perl.

   Where do I send bug reports?
       (contributed by brian d foy)

       First, ensure that you've found an actual bug. Second,
       ensure you've found an actual bug.

       If you've found a bug with the perl interpreter or one of
       the modules in the standard library (those that come with
       Perl), you can use the "perlbug" utility that comes with
       Perl (>= 5.004). It collects information about your
       installation to include with your message, then sends the
       message to the right place.

       To determine if a module came with your version of Perl,
       you can use the "Module::CoreList" module. It has the
       information about the modules (with their versions)
       included with each release of Perl.

       Every CPAN module has a bug tracker set up in RT,
       http://rt.cpan.org .  You can submit bugs to RT either
       through its web interface or by email. To email a bug
       report, send it to bug-<distribution-name>@rt.cpan.org .
       For example, if you wanted to report a bug in
       "Business::ISBN", you could send a message to
       bug-Business-ISBN@rt.cpan.org .

       Some modules might have special reporting requirements,
       such as a Sourceforge or Google Code tracking system, so
       you should check the module documentation too.

   What is perl.com? Perl Mongers? pm.org? perl.org? cpan.org?
       Perl.com at http://www.perl.com/ is part of the O'Reilly
       Network, a subsidiary of O'Reilly Media.

       The Perl Foundation is an advocacy organization for the
       Perl language which maintains the web site
       http://www.perl.org/ as a general advocacy site for the
       Perl language. It uses the domain to provide general
       support services to the Perl community, including the
       hosting of mailing lists, web sites, and other services.
       There are also many other sub-domains for special topics
       like learning Perl, Perl news, jobs in Perl, such as:






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               http://learn.perl.org/
               http://use.perl.org/
               http://jobs.perl.org/
               http://lists.perl.org/

       Perl Mongers uses the pm.org domain for services related
       to Perl user groups, including the hosting of mailing
       lists and web sites.  See the Perl user group web site at
       http://www.pm.org/ for more information about joining,
       starting, or requesting services for a Perl user group.

       http://www.cpan.org/ is the Comprehensive Perl Archive
       Network, a replicated worldwide repository of Perl
       software, see the What is CPAN? question earlier in this
       document.

REVISION
       Revision: $Revision: 1.11 $

       Date: $Date: 2009/10/12 18:24:47 $

       See perlfaq for source control details and availability.

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
       Copyright (c) 1997-2009 Tom Christiansen, Nathan
       Torkington, and other authors as noted. All rights
       reserved.

       This documentation is free; you can redistribute it and/or
       modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

       Irrespective of its distribution, all code examples here
       are in the public domain.  You are permitted and
       encouraged to use this code and any derivatives thereof in
       your own programs for fun or for profit as you see fit.  A
       simple comment in the code giving credit to the FAQ would
       be courteous but is not required.




















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