Going Deeper

Going deeper? We've barely gone shallow! You'll find this section at the end of each lesson in this book. The idea behind these “Going Deeper” sections is that there's stuff about Perl that I don't have the time to teach you, or additional ways of doing things (remember, “there's more than one way to do it”). The Going Deeper section in each chapter will give you short overview of these features and pointers to places where you can learn more—the online Perl documentation that comes with your Perl interpreter or the information on http://www.perl.com/.

Getting Perl Documentation

Much of Perl's online documentation is in the form of man pages (man being Unix shorthand for manual). Throughout this book, I'll be referring to those man pages, for example, the perlfunc or perlop man pages. If you're on a Unix system, you can usually access these man pages using the man command, like this:

% man perlfunc
						

The contents of all the man pages are also available in pod format, a special form of Perl documentation that can be read on any platform or converted to plain text or HTML using conversion programs that come with Perl (pod stands for plain old documentation). The pod pages themselves are stored in the pod directory of your Perl distribution; you can read them on Unix or Windows using the perldoc command and the name of a Perl man page, like this:

% perldoc perlfunc
						

If you want to know about a specific Perl function such as print or chomp, use the -f option to perldoc, as follows:

% perldoc
							-f print
						

Finally, all the Perl man pages are also available on the Web at http://www.perldoc.com/. Often, I find it easier to read and search the Perl man pages via the Web than with the perldoc or man commands.

If you can't take any of this silly online stuff, and you must have a paper document, one the best ways to go deeper, in general, is in the book, Programming Perl (Wall, Christiansen and Orwant, O'Reilly, 2000), also known as the Camel book (for the camel on its cover). The camel book is the definitive reference bible for Perl, and describes Perl in almost terrifying detail—although it's also quite dense and hard to read. The goal of Sams Teach Yourself Perl is that you'll learn all the basics, but if you do want to explore some of the more esoteric features of the language, you'll probably find Programming Perl an important volume to have. (My copy is quite well-thumbed and scribbled in.)

Getting Help

In addition to the man pages with Perl and online at www.perl.com, there are also a number of places you can get help learning Perl from other people if you're stuck.

The Web site http://learn.perl.org has a number of resources for beginners, including a whole lot of articles on basics and common problems (with solutions). They also host a number of E-mail mailing lists where you can ask questions.

If you have access to Usenet news, the newsgroup comp.lang.perl.misc is a very high volume group, but a lot of people who are very involved with Perl monitor that group. Be forewarned that you should try to get your questions answered using resources on the Web before asking on Usenet; if your question has already been answered in an FAQ you might find the responses you get from a Usenet post to be quite abrupt.