Online documentation? Of course, `perldoc' is the canonical answer. I believe however that Tom Christianson is perldoc's author and has himself referred to perldoc as "this noisome program" (for a sense of what 'noisome' means please read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien ;-). Just mentioned as background data.

It doesn't hurt a newbie to *nix-style programming to learn to use man pages, in general, though. I happen to like manpages. GNU feel that the `info' system is superior but good 'ol `man' still does the trick in a pinch. On some systems that I have had, `man' worked considerably better than `perldoc' did.

A non-ActiveState Perl-Win32 installation might install the actual Perl man pages for you. One such would be the Perl built with Cygwin. So in fact on most *nix boxen and some Winboxen as well, you could type 'man perlfunc' and get the man-ized Perl functions documentation presented by the type formatting system backend behind the `man' command. That backend is a complex many-headed creature referred to variously as 'nroff' and 'troff' and also may involve a sort of wrapper program named 'groff' which is GNU software. So, just FYI, it is actually possible to read manpages on Windows -- not just the Perl manpages (which may well not be there unless you deliberately do something to generate some, 'cause ActivePerl won't), but any manpages at all: a Win32 port of groff is available as a precompiled binary (or download source yourself and build it using free tools like the mingw project provides): find it here at the SourceForge-hosted "Gnu-Win32" project site. With groff and some patience and pluck one can get a manreader working even without an available port of 'man'. I wrote one and it works pretty nicely (it is a shell script).

Intrepid a.k.a. perlspinr a.k.a. Soren Andersen