Writing Modules

nimdokk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings,
I'm seeking some suggestions on where to look for information on writing modules (apart from the Camel book and any tutorials here). We have an application that we use a lot and if it turns out that I am unable to replace it with another method, I was toying with the idea of writing a module to access it. There is information in the application's docs about writing C/C++ routines and also inserting it into scripts (shell mainly but I've adapted those into Perl). I've got a modular routine that we use and it works quite nicely but I can't always access certain features because those features might break something else since all the script rely on it. I'm just trying to come up with a way to make our job easier since the current way we access the application is kludgy to say the least. I'm keeping this specifically generic, just after some places where I can look for some information on how to go about writing this module that I want. I know how to write modules, but not one that us for a specific app.

Hopefully that makes sense. Many thanks for any suggestions.

"Ex libris un peut de tout"

Comment on Writing Modules

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Re: Writing Modules by rob_au (Abbot) on Jan 13, 2004 at 11:30 UTC
Your best reference I would think would be the book Writing Perl Modules for CPAN by samtregar who is a very fluent and quite well respected contributor to the Perl community. There are a number of reviews of this book available online for browsing - Two such reviews include that in the January 2003 edition of The Perl Journal and that on Perl.com. `perl -le "print unpack'N', pack'B32', '00000000000000000000001010101001'"`	[reply]
Re: Re: Writing Modules by nimdokk (Vicar) on Jan 13, 2004 at 14:03 UTC
Thanks, I'll have to check that out. I'm actually kind of hoping that I won't end up writing this module but it would be good experience. "Ex libris un peut de tout"	[reply]
Re: Writing Modules by MrCromeDome (Deacon) on Jan 13, 2004 at 14:31 UTC
If you want something to try something to get your feet wet first, check out the excellent Simple Module Tutorial by tachyon. It's a very good introduction to writing modules, complete with some good examples. Hope this helps! MrCromeDome	[reply]
Re: Writing Modules by hmerrill (Friar) on Jan 13, 2004 at 14:52 UTC
Great suggestions by others already, but I just wanted to be sure you were aware of the excellent documentation that comes with Perl - the perldocs. At a command prompt, do `perldoc perl` [download] and you'll see a list of all the individual perldocs that come with perl. While you're in 'perldoc perl', page down until you see these listed: `perlmod perlmodlib perlmodstyle perlmodinstall perlnewmod` [download] Each one is listed with a short description of what information it contains. HTH.	[reply] [d/l] [select]