4.5 Using the Perl Documentation

A Perl programmer's most important resource is the Perl documentation. It should be installed on your computer, and it may also be found on the Internet at the Perl site. The Perl documentation may come in slightly different forms on your computer system, but the web version is the same for everybody. That's the version I refer to in this book. See the references in Appendix A for more discussion about different sources of Perl documentation.

Just to try it out, let's look up the print operator. First, open your web browser, and go to http://www.perl.com. Then click on the Documentation link. Select "Perl's Builtin Functions" and then "Alphabetical Listing of Perl's Functions". You'll see a rather lengthy alphabetical listing of Perl's functions. Once you've found this page, you may want to bookmark it in your browser, as you may find yourself turning to it frequently. Now click on Print to view the print operator.

Check out the examples they give to see how the language feature is actually used. This is usually the quickest way to extract what you need to know.

Once you've got the documentation on your screen, you may find that reading it answers some questions but raises others. The documentation tends to give the entire story in a concise form, and this can be daunting for beginners. For instance, the documentation for the print function starts out: "Prints a string or a comma-separated list of strings. Returns TRUE if successful." But then comes a bunch of gibberish (or so it seems at this point in your learning curve!) Filehandles? Output streams? List context?

All this information is necessary in documentation; after all, you need to get the whole story somewhere! Usually you can ignore what doesn't make sense.

The Perl documentation also includes several tutorials that can be a great help in learning Perl. They occasionally assume more than a beginner's knowledge about programming languages, but you may find them very useful. Exploring the documentation is a great way to get up to speed on the Perl language.