Modern Perl
searh.pan.org
and available on
http://rt.pan.org/
. Perl 5 and Perl 6 have separate RT queues available on
http://
rt.perl.org/
.
The Perl 5 Porters (or p5p) mailing list is the focal point of the development of Perl 5 itself. See
http://lists.pan.org/
showlist.gi?name=perl5- porters
.
The Perl Foundation (
http://www.perlfoundation.org/
) hosts a wiki for all things Perl 5. See
http://www.perlfoundation.
org/perl5
.
Many Perl hackers use Github (
http://github.om/
) to host their projects
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. See especially Gitpan (
http://github.om/
gitpan/
), which hosts Git repositories chronicling the complete history of every distribution on the CPAN.
Events
There are plenty of events in the physical world as well. The Perl community holds a lot of conferences, workshops, and
seminars. In particular, the community-run YAPC—Yet Another Perl Conference—is a successful, local, low-cost conference
model held on multiple continents. See
http://yap.org/
.
The Perl Foundation wiki lists other events at
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.gi?perl_events
.
There are also hundreds of local Perl Mongers groups which get together frequently for technical talks and social interaction.
See
http://www.pm.org/
.
IRC
When Perl mongers aren’t at local meetings or conferences or workshops, many collaborate and chat online through IRC, a
textual group chat system from the early days of the Internet. Many of the most popular and useful Perl projects have their own
IRC channels, such as #moose or #catalyst.
The main server for Perl community is
ir://ir.perl.org/
. Other notable channels include #perl-help, for general assis-
tance on Perl programming, and #perl-qa, devoted to testing and other quality issues. Be aware that the channel #perl is not for
general help—instead, it’s a general purpose room for discussing whatever its participants want to discuss
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.
The CPAN
Perl 5 is a pragmatic language. It’ll help you get your work done. Yet the ever-pragmatic Perl community has extended that
language and made their work available to the world. If you have a problem to solve, chances are someone’s already uploaded
code to the CPAN for it.
The line between a modern language and its libraries is fuzzy. Is a language only syntax? Is it the core libraries? Is it the
availability of external libraries and the ease at which you can use them within your own projects?
Regardless of how you answer those questions for any other language, modern Perl programming makes heavy use of the CPAN
(
http://www.pan.org/
). The CPAN, or Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is an uploading and mirroring system for
redistributable, reusable Perl code. It’s one of—if not the—largest archives of libraries of code in the world.
CPAN mirrors distributions, which tend to be collections of reusable Perl code. A single distribution can contain one or more
modules, or self-contained libraries of Perl code. Each distribution lives in its own namespace on the CPAN and contains its
own metadata. You can build, install, test, and update each distribution. Distributions may depend on other distributions. For
this reason, installing distributions through a CPAN client is often simpler than doing so manually.
The CPAN itself is merely a mirroring service. Authors upload distributions containing modules, and the CPAN sends them
to mirror sites, from which users and CPAN clients download, configure, build, test, and install distributions. Yet the CPAN
has succeeded because of this simplicity, and because of the contributions of thousands of volunteers who’ve built on this
8
...including the sources of this book at
http://github.om/hromati/modern_perl_book/
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...and it’s not often friendly to people who ask basic programming questions.
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