in reply to Many many modules

Your question is somewhat unclear to me.

I assume that you are looking for documentation for the Perl modules you get from CPAN or somewhere else. Perl modules normally include their documentation right in the source code in the POD (Plain Old Documentation) format, and different outputs are generated when you install the module. Under UNIX, perldoc modulename will show you the documentation and with ActiveState Perl under Windows, the documentation will be included with the HTML documentation for ActiveState Perl itself.

If you look for documentation beyond what's included and / or automatically generated, there are not many possibilities. Some of the Books about Perl discuss several important modules like CGI.pm, at other times, the module author might be of assistance, but in general, Perl modules lack good documentation, as it is the case with most open source stuff. Of course, the Open Source Apology for not providing documentation also holds here, you can still look at the module source code to figure out how it works :).

A special case is the Image::Magick module, where the documentation is not included with the Perl modules (but only a meagre page telling us it has more bugs than the imagemagick program suite alone), but the Perl documentation comes with the ImageMagick program suite itself (for reasons unknown to me).

Of course, if you have any specific questions or are in search of examples, a question here will most likely turn up many useful answers.

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RE: RE: Many many modules
by le (Friar) on Jul 26, 2000 at 13:18 UTC
    ...but in general, Perl modules lack good documentation...

    I have to disagree, because IMHO, Perl Modules come with a rather good documentation, as you mentioned the perldoc. This is sufficient in most cases, if you just want to use the module. Of course, if you want to write and/or _understand_ a module, you have to look elsewhere.

      Hmmm - after desperately searching for a module in the standard distribution of Perl, I have to admit that I can't come up with an example of bad documentation. I only remember that the documentation for HTML::Parser was really bad, as they documented that one could "use either the version 2 compatible interface" (which was nowhere documented but maybe in the obsolete version of this module that was no more around) or the new (and completely different) version 3 interface, but the documentation completely lacked any example. Maybe that's because the documentation for this module is supposed to be in some book, I don't know.

      But nonetheless, I have to admit, Perl module documentation is not bad in general, it was only my perception of the documentation (you seldom notice good documentation :).