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perlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl
This section of the FAQ answers questions about where to find source and documentation for
Perl, support, and related matters.
The standard release of Perl (the one maintained by the perl development team) is distributed
only in source code form. You can find this at http://www.cpan.org/src/latest.tar.gz , which is
in a standard Internet format (a gzipped archive in POSIX tar format).
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, including Apple systems, 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).
If you don't have a C compiler because your vendor for whatever reasons did not include one
with your system, the best thing to do is grab a binary version of gcc from the net and use that
to compile perl with. CPAN only has binaries for systems that are terribly hard to get free
compilers for, not for Unix systems.
Some URLs that might help you are:
http://www.cpan.org/ports/
http://www.perl.com/pub/language/info/software.html
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Someone looking for a Perl for Win16 might look to Laszlo Molnar's djgpp port in http://www.cpan.org/ports/#msdos
, which comes with clear installation instructions. A simple installation guide for MS-DOS using
Ilya Zakharevich's OS/2 port is available at http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perl5dos.html and
similarly for Windows 3.1 at http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perlwin3.html .
Since you don't have a C compiler, you're doomed and your 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.
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 -e 'print join("\n",@INC)'
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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
You might also want to check out perlfaq8/"How
do I keep my own module/library directory?".
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.
CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a ~700mb archive replicated on nearly 200
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 there are close to two 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 not affiliated with O'Reilly and Associates.
Certainly not. Larry expects that he'll be certified before Perl is.
The complete Perl documentation is available with the Perl distribution. If you have Perl
installed locally, you 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.cpan.org/ or http://www.perldoc.com/ both offer the
complete documentation in html format.
Many good books have been written about Perl--see the section below 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. The following URLs
might also be of assistance:
http://perldoc.cpan.org/
http://www.perldoc.com/
http://reference.perl.com/query.cgi?tutorials
http://bookmarks.cpan.org/search.cgi?cat=Training%2FTutorials
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The now defunct comp.lang.perl newsgroup has been superseded by the following groups:
comp.lang.perl.announce Moderated announcement group
comp.lang.perl.misc Very busy group about Perl in general
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
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Writing CGI scripts for the Web.
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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.* 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/
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.
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.
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. Tom Christiansen maintains a list of these books, some
with extensive reviews, at http://www.perl.com/perl/critiques/index.html .
The incontestably definitive reference book on Perl, written by the creator of Perl, is now
(July 2000) in its third edition:
Programming Perl (the "Camel Book"):
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
(English, translations to several languages are also available)
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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 1-56592-243-3 [1st Edition August 1998]
http://perl.oreilly.com/cookbook/
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If you're already a seasoned programmer, then the Camel Book might suffice for you to learn
Perl from. If you're not, check out the Llama book:
Learning Perl (the "Llama Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix
ISBN 0-596-00132-0 [3rd edition July 2001]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl3/
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If you're not an accidental programmer, but a more serious and possibly even degreed computer
scientist who doesn't need as much hand-holding as we try to provide in the Llama, please check
out the delightful book
Perl: The Programmer's Companion
by Nigel Chapman
ISBN 0-471-97563-X [1997, 3rd printing Spring 1998]
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/97563-X.htm
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/chapman/perl/perltpc.html (errata etc)
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If you are more at home in Windows the following is available (though unfortunately rather
dated).
Learning Perl on Win32 Systems (the "Gecko Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen,
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-324-3 [1st edition August 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperlwin/
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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 0-596-00032-4 [3rd edition May 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlpr3/
Perl in a Nutshell
by Ellen Siever, Stephan Spainhour, and Nathan Patwardhan
ISBN 1-56592-286-7 [1st edition December 1998]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlnut/
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- Tutorials
-
Elements of Programming with Perl
by Andrew L. Johnson
ISBN 1-884777-80-5 [1st edition October 1999]
http://www.manning.com/Johnson/
Learning Perl
by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix
ISBN 0-596-00132-0 [3rd edition July 2001]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl3/
Learning Perl on Win32 Systems
by Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen,
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-324-3 [1st edition August 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperlwin/
Perl: The Programmer's Companion
by Nigel Chapman
ISBN 0-471-97563-X [1997, 3rd printing Spring 1998]
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/97563-X.htm
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/chapman/perl/perltpc.html (errata etc)
Cross-Platform Perl
by Eric Foster-Johnson
ISBN 1-55851-483-X [2nd edition September 2000]
http://www.pconline.com/~erc/perlbook.htm
MacPerl: Power and Ease
by Vicki Brown and Chris Nandor,
with foreword by Matthias Neeracher
ISBN 1-881957-32-2 [1st edition May 1998]
http://www.macperl.com/ptf_book/
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- Task-Oriented
-
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/
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- Special Topics
-
Mastering Regular Expressions
by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
ISBN 1-56592-257-3 [1st edition January 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex/
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/
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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. As of mid-2001, the dead tree version of TPJ will be published as a quarterly
supplement of SysAdmin magazine ( http://www.sysadminmag.com/ ) For more details on TPJ, see
http://www.tpj.com/
Beyond this, magazines that frequently carry quality articles on Perl are 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: ( 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/
.
To get the best performance, pick a site from the list below and use it to grab the complete
list of mirror sites which is at /CPAN/MIRRORED.BY or at http://mirror.cpan.org/ . From there
you can find the quickest site for you. Remember, the following list is not the complete
list of CPAN mirrors (the complete list contains 165 sites as of January 2001):
http://www.cpan.org/
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/
http://download.sourceforge.net/mirrors/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/plan/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.flirble.org/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.uvsq.fr/pub/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.dti.ad.jp/pub/lang/CPAN/
ftp://cpan.if.usp.br/pub/mirror/CPAN/
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One may also use xx.cpan.org where "xx" is the 2-letter country code for your
domain; e.g. Australia would use au.cpan.org. [Note: This only applies to countries that host at
least one mirror.]
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:
( also visible as http://lists.perl.org/ )
The Google search engine now carries archived and searchable newsgroup content.
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.lang.perl.misc
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.
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 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.
Alternatively, you can purchase commercial incidence based support through the Perl Clinic.
The following is a commercial from them:
"The Perl Clinic is a commercial Perl support service operated by ActiveState Tool Corp.
and The Ingram Group. The operators have many years of in-depth experience with Perl
applications and Perl internals on a wide range of platforms.
"Through our group of highly experienced and well-trained support engineers, we will put
our best effort into understanding your problem, providing an explanation of the situation, and
a recommendation on how to proceed."
Contact The Perl Clinic at
www.PerlClinic.com
North America Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8)
Tel: 1 604 606-4611 hours 8am-6pm
Fax: 1 604 606-4640
Europe (GMT)
Tel: 00 44 1483 862814
Fax: 00 44 1483 862801
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See also www.perl.com for updates on tutorials, training, and support.
If you are reporting a bug in the perl interpreter or the modules shipped with Perl, use the perlbug
program in the Perl distribution or mail your report to perlbug@perl.org .
If you are posting a bug with a non-standard port (see the answer to "What platforms is
Perl available for?"), a binary distribution, or a non-standard module (such as Tk, CGI,
etc), then please see the documentation that came with it to determine the correct place to post
bugs.
Read the perlbug(1) man page (perl5.004 or later) for more information.
The Perl Home Page at http://www.perl.com/ is currently hosted by The O'Reilly Network, a
subsidiary of O'Reilly and Associates.
Perl Mongers 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.
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.
Perl Mongers also maintain the perl.org domain to provide general support services to the
Perl community, including the hosting of mailing lists, web sites, and other services. The web
site http://www.perl.org/ is a general advocacy site for the Perl language, and there are many
other sub-domains for special topics, such as
http://bugs.perl.org/
http://history.perl.org/
http://lists.perl.org/
http://use.perl.org/
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http://www.cpan.org/ is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a replicated worlwide
repository of Perl software, see the What is CPAN? question earlier in this document.
Copyright (c) 1997-2001 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington. 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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