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For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)

by andye (Curate)
on Dec 14, 2001 at 20:41 UTC ( [id://131994]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

There's nothing wrong with being a beginner, or with asking basic questions. I've asked lots, and plan to continue doing so.

But lately we seem to have had some questions that, well, I'd expect people to be able to answer for themselves, with a little research.

So I thought I'd do a roundup of basic information sources. This is off the top of my head, so if other monks want to chip in with similar resources, then that would be peachy. ;)

  • We have a charming Tutorials section
  • Not to mention Categorized Questions and Answers
  • Super Search is your friend!
  • Every (mainstream) module has documentation, usually copious and clear. You can search.cpan.org to find it
  • perl.com has many useful resources.
  • groups.google.com has nearly 3 million articles about Perl.
  • O'Reilly and Manning (among others) publish useful Perl books (many of which have Reviews). If you're Learning Perl, you could do worse than buy Learning Perl.
  • Under Unix, type man perl and perldoc perldoc for access to a positive Library of information. (Windows equivalents, Windows-monks?)
  • Anyone programming in Perl really needs to own a copy of Programming Perl (known as the Camel Book).
Don't let this put anyone off from asking basic questions, please, or I won't feel entitled to ask them myself. ;) Just look in one or more of the above places, before you ask.

Cheers,
andy.

Update: turnstep's home node has loads of useful information about the monastery. (thanks arhuman).

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)
by Caillte (Friar) on Dec 14, 2001 at 21:27 UTC

    Activestate provide a nice HTML version of all the perldocs with a link on the start|programs|Activestate perl menu.

    This page is intentionally left justified.

Re: For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)
by thunders (Priest) on Dec 14, 2001 at 22:32 UTC
    for windows you can:
  • use perldoc
  • perldoc pageName-for man pages
    perldoc ModuleName-for module documentation
    perldoc -m ModuleName-for module code
    perldoc -f functionName-function definitions
  • Start->Programs->Perl->Documentation -Full HTML Documentation
      Between the ActiveSatate docs and the Perl CD bookshelf, I have a more than adequate perl library for most any programming projects.
Re: For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)
by Moonie (Friar) on Dec 15, 2001 at 00:37 UTC
Re: For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)
by blakem (Monsignor) on Dec 15, 2001 at 00:37 UTC
    perldoc.com is an excellent on-line collection of all sorts of perl documentation. For instance, it contains the documentation that comes with various versions of perl along with documentation for many of the optional modules as well.

    -Blake

Re: For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)
by Elvis (Sexton) on Dec 17, 2001 at 00:00 UTC
Re: For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)
by ellem (Hermit) on Dec 16, 2001 at 05:57 UTC
    Hopefully things can stay this friendly. CLPMisc has gotten scary. Nearly to the point where nearly everything is flamebait. I hope this site can remain friendly to the newbie. Perl can only benefit from a good attitude towards newbies.
    --
    lmoran@wtsg.com
    There's more than one way to do it, just don't use my way.
      You know, people have been making this observation for the last 5 or 6 years now (See my TPJ article on the subject).

      I think to say that a Usenet news group seems to be "getting worse" is like saying that you walked to school in the snow, uphill -- both ways.

        The fact that people have been making an observation does not make it wrong.

        Though I wouldn't know how much the observation has been true in the last 4 years. I got tired of observing the downwards trend first-hand and left Usenet then. Since then my only Usenet posts have been email lists that got echoed to Usenet.

        I don't think I said it got any worse. I did say "gotten scary" which I suppose could be construed as getting worse and I don't care to fight over words. Scary/Worse OK. But seems to me since the "Knitting Female" changed to the "Tokyo Lizard" things have gotten, well, scarier. In no way is it related to "it" that "lives under bridges" but I merely use the above event as a time frame for when I noticed an attitude change.

        I took a bus to school ;)
        --
        lmoran@wtsg.com
        There's more than one way to do it, just don't use my way.
Re: For Beginners: Basic Information Resources (or, Where to Look Things Up)
by thunders (Priest) on Dec 17, 2001 at 10:44 UTC
    I commented earlier on Activestate's HTML Documentation. I have Build 629 installed on my pc. I installed a more recent version on a friends pc and was dismayed to realize that they switched the HTML documentation from a large group of HTML files to a single .chm(compiled HTML) file. This might be a resonable move for some applications, but it does not work well with perl where new modules need to be added to the core distro. The old way, new package downloads would add HTML docs to a table of contents and make life easy, now you have to hunt through the directory tree. Anyway you can still download the old style documentation with a ppm command, But I wish that they didn't add this "improvement" by default.
      I hate this new compiled HTML doc. It has (last time I checked - and edited stylesheets) font size hardcoded, so you cannot increase it.

      I am interested in your suggestion to load old-style docs using PPM. Do you mean ActiveState module manager? How to do that?

      Also (I assume you are expert in ActiveState distro :-) ), some AS modules are quite obsolete. Are there any other sites with PPM archives? Thanks!

      pmas
      To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.

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