perlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl ($Revision:
1.7 $, $Date: 2004/04/07 21:33:08 $)
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 this at http://www.cpan.org/src/lat-
est.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).
How can I get a binary version 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
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
.
I don't have a C compiler on my system. How can I compile
perl?
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.
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 [Toc] [Back]
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
~1.2Gb 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.
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
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://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
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Writing CGI
scripts for the Web.
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.*" 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 [Toc] [Back]
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)
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/catalog/cookbook/
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/
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:
Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules (the
"Alpaca Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz, with Tom Phoenix (foreword
by Damian Conway)
ISBN 0-596-00478-8 [1st edition June 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lrnperlorm/
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/perlt-
pc.html (errata etc)
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/
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/
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 Objects, References, and Modules
by Randal L. Schwartz, with Tom Phoenix (foreword by Damian Conway)
ISBN 0-596-00478-8 [1st edition June 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lrnperlorm/
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/perlt-
pc.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/
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/
Special Topics
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 in Magazines [Toc] [Back]
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.
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.theperlre-
view.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/ .
Perl on the Net: FTP and WWW Access
To get the best performance, pick a site from the list at
http://www.cpan.org/SITES.html . From there you can find
the quickest site for you.
You 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.]
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/
Archives of comp.lang.perl.misc [Toc] [Back]
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.
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 welldefined
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
See also www.perl.com for updates on tutorials, training,
and support.
Where do I send bug reports?
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 [email protected]
.
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.
What is perl.com? Perl Mongers? pm.org? perl.org?
cpan.org?
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/
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.
perl v5.8.5 2002-11-06 12 [ Back ] |
