ItWorld is discontinuing the Perl newsletter, so this is my farewell article. That being the case, I decided to try to leave you with a few tidbits of wisdom and suggestions of where else to turn for help.

The first place to turn for help is perl itself — running perl with the -w switch and ‘use strict’ enabled will help you catch many little bugs, typos, and questionable practices.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use strict;

If you know your program will be used only with Perl-5.6 and later version you can use the ‘warnings’ pragma to turn on warnings instead of the -w switch (this pragma allows more control over warnings, see the ‘perllexwarn’ manpage for further information):

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use warnings;

The perl distribution also comes with copious amounts of documentation that you can read via a browser (if the docs are installed in .html format), the unix ‘man’ utility, or the supplied ‘perldoc’ utility. The 3 major pages (documents) you should be familiar with are:

    perldoc perl     --> the intro perl documentation
    perldoc perlfaq  --> many frequently asked questions (and answers)
    perldoc perlfunc --> documentation on builtin functions

There are quite a few mailing lists you can participate in at various levels (including lists for beginners, module authors, specific modules or distributions, and even a ‘fun with perl’ list). Information can be found at:

    http://lists.perl.org/

The ‘use Perl’ site publishes news and informative tidbits (along with other features), perl.com also publishes articles on various themes and at various levels, and The Perl Journal (now part of SysAdmin magazine) is a very good print publication:

    http://use.perl.org/
    http://www.perl.com/
    http://www.tpj.com/

Join or start your own local chapter of a ‘Perl Mongers’ group by checking out this site:

    http://www.pm.org/

And, lastly, the Perl Monks site is a web forum for questions, answers, tutorials, and discussions on Perl related topics (there are quite a few very knowledgeable individuals there):

    http://www.perlmonks.org/

And, last but certainly not least, do not forget about CPAN (comprehensive perl archive network) — there are loads and loads of free modules there that you should not ignore. Everything from dealing with CSV files to networking to graphics manipulation (and a whole lot more) can be found therein. A few CPAN entry points:

    http://www.cpan.org/
    http://search.cpan.org/
    http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/CPAN/cpan-search.html

I have very much enjoyed writing these (80+) weekly articles, and I appreciate the numerous comments and suggestions I have received from many of you (even if I didn’t get around to writing on all of the suggested topics). Thank you and I wish you all the best of luck with your Perl programming and perhaps I’ll run into some of you in the future.

            Best regards,
            andrew

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