Perl Documentation
This mention of the perldebtut
man page is a good
place to talk about the official Perl documentation. There is a very
complete set of documentation that comes free with Perl. If everyone
was tied down and forced to read every word of it, we’d all
know a lot more about Perl.
Unfortunately, the sheer quantity of the Perl documentation, along with the fact that much of it is written for people who are already experienced programmers, can make things tough for accidental programmers. There is a subset of the Perl documentation, though, that you should definitely try to familiarize yourself with now—if only so you’ll know where to look for answers later on, when those answers will make more sense to you.
man perl, perldoc perl
You can read the Perl documentation by entering
man
perl
at the Unix command
line. If you are on a system that doesn’t have the
man
command (for example, because you installed
Perl locally on your PC or Mac), you can use a utility called
perldoc
that comes bundled with Perl by entering
perldoc
perl
. (Also, the
ActiveState version of Perl installs the Perl documentation as HTML
pages accessible under the Start menu.)
The Perl documentation has been split up into numerous sections; you
access the appropriate section by entering man
sectionname
or perldoc
sectionname
. More about this, including
the list of section names, in that first man perl
page.
Some of those Perl manpages are going to be over your head for now, but among the ones you should ...
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