Perl for C Programmers

Online Documentation

Perl comes with about 15,000 pages of online documentation. This book doesn’t reproduce all this documentation, but instead tells you how to access it. (Sets of books are available for purchase that contain a paper copy of most of the online documentation, but they are expensive, out-of-date, and more difficult to access than the stuff that comes with Perl.) Why use your own money when there is a book 15,000 pages long right on your hard drive?

Perl’s online documentation makes a reference manual unnecessary if you know how to tickle Perl in such a way that it gives you the information you want. In the next few sections, you learn how to do just that.

perldoc

The main way to access Perl’s documentation is through the