On Wednesday, Nov 26, 2003, at 12:21 US/Pacific, Jerry Rocteur wrote: [..]
[..]In as much as perldoc is your friend (Just like Google ;-) I find when you first use perldoc you get awfully confused as to which one to look for.
I like to use perldoc perltoc and of course <http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perltoc.html> is the bees knees..
Sorry if this is old news to most of you but I could not get comfortable with perldoc until I started using perldoc perltoc and this is a beginners list after all.
Honor where Honor is Due!
It's been a while since I have actually strolled through the perltoc but you make a good argument that it can provide a novice with more information at a glance than they can shake a stick at!
I think the critical part is 'get comfortable with perldoc' which also means dealing with the fact that it IS an ongoing evolution of interesting and useful ideas.
{ you will forgive the sense of nostalgia here. }
As an illustration of the 'problem' Sys::Syslog was added to the 'core' deliverables with perl 5.004_02 and that was '97/'98 around the time that ActiveState and O'Reilly announced a partnership to deal with the WIN32 API. <http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html> or perldoc perlhist
prior to that folks had to download it from the CPAN and make it themselves. ( and yes, CPAN.pm goes post Alpah dec '96/ jan '97 )
so with six+ MORE years of additions, it should come as any surprise to us, that the perltoc has, grown a little here and there?
When folks step back and remember that the 'pink book' came out in '91, the First Edition of Programming Perl, and that before that folks either read usenet news, or were a perl-packrat, or knew a perl-packrat, or simply had a social disease...
So merely from the first canonical publishing of a 'real book on perl' there is basically only the distilation of 13 years of PerlWars[tm] and the holy crusades against WhatEver that makes the documentation a bit longer, and a bit more complex than it was 'back in the good old days'.
At the other end of that kvetching, of course, is the IMPORTANCE of writing good POD to go with the new projects that folks work on. This way those coming up the line will be able to find, and use, and understand, and argue with authority, what the project was all about.
ciao drieux
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