I recently came across the Perl 5 Wiki at the Perl foundation. They have, after reading only a few pages, a really solid guide to top picks from the CPAN.

I want to mention for completeness, though not particularly useful for the present purpose, that we do have on-site our own section of Module Reviews.

A word spoken in Mind will reach its own level, in the objective world, by its own weight

I was hoping to be able to point you to CPAN Ratings, but alas, it appears that making a top-rated modules list is still sitting in their to-do list.

While http://search.cpan.org/ purportedly includes a rating, in fact, it provides only a set of code, indicating dev stage,language used (yep! to provide distinctions between pure Perl, C-based modules, and so on). However, the coding for "support" includes an "abandoned" category, which may be somewhat helpful.

Update, clarification: The link above takes you to a CPAN|Search page which lists various categories of modules. Follow your interest,and the next page provided offers the "DSLIP" information, as above.

Thanks, jdporter for pointing out the need for this clarification, and for also pointing us to http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html, which also offers "DSLIP" coding.

You can always download, e.g., 'http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/02packages.details.txt' - this would give you a list of all the latest and greatest - but what for? If you just want the latest version of the module, that happens automatically when you download from CPAN.

If you just want your modules to stay up-to-date, you can do what the CPAN documentation recommends: set up a cron job (or whatever the equivalent is in Windows) to run the following on, say, a weekly schedule:

perl -MCPAN -e 'CPAN::Shell->install(CPAN::Shell->r)'
[download]

-- 
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- HG Wells

Here's a list of some popular packages.

I would like to see this because searching by namespace can be problematic.

The problem I do see is people who use illogical names because of these associations. If I try to find alternatives to Datetime I can imagine all these modules that would like this Herkums::Uber::Date::And::Time::Transmorgifier!