Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:

the perldiag manpage has a complete list of perl's error messages and warnings, with explanatory text. You can also use the splain program (distributed with perl) to explain the error messages:

    perl program 2>diag.out
    splain [-v] [-p] diag.out

or change your program to explain the messages for you:

    use diagnostics;

or

    use diagnostics -verbose;