You were absolutely right. After installing openssl-dev everything went ok.

Note to self, I really must finish off my module installation tutorial in the very near future.

The Perl prerequisites can be found on the cpan page for each module, there should be a link on the right hand side named ''Dependencies''. Other non perl prerequisites are usually listed in the documentation for the module in question. This includes INSTALL and README files. You can browse this via the cpan web interface or by using the cpan client to look at a module or distribution:

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Note that the cpan client dropped me into a shell (command prompt on windows) and I type the contents of INSTALL, the Linux/Unix equivalent (as I'm sure you know, but for the benefit of others) is cat.

Some modules require external programs or as is well documented in the WWW::Mechanize::Firefox example above, other programs and/or plugins.

-dev packages contain library headers and other development files for a package. These may be required and ideally should be listed in a perl modules documentation. Feel free to submit a patch for this module suggesting this :)