The Perl Programming Language

Perl comes with a small book worth of documentation: on the language, the standard library modules, the standard language extensions, and some utility programs. The documentation may be viewed either via the perldoc command, as standard IRIX man pages, or as these HTML pages.

This documentation is part of the SGI Freeware distribution of the Perl programming language. This page links to the HTML-ified version of the standard documentation for Perl version 5.005 maintenance patch 2.

The Standard Perl Documentation

Additional Resources

If you can reach the World Wide Web, then you have access to several additional Perl resources:

the central repository for Perl source, modules, extensions, scripts, etc: CPAN -- the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. If you need to do something with Perl, there is a good chance that it has already been done, so check CPAN first. There are many mirrors of this site around the world, if it is slow to get to this one.
Perl is primarily developed and supported on several mailing lists and Internet newsgroups. The most common ones are:
- To keep up to date about bug fixes for perl, new modules and extensions, etc, check the comp.lang.perl.announce newsgroup.
- For general Perl questions use the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup.
- For questions about creating new perl modules and extensions, use the comp.lang.perl.modules newsgroup.
And there is The Perl Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to making Perl more useful for everyone.

Standard but largely inapplicable documentation

Last modified: Tue Aug 25 23:10:06 1998