Have you looked at CPAN (see L<perlfaq2>)? The chances are that
someone has already written a module that can solve your problem.
-Have you read the appropriate man pages? Here's a brief index:
+Have you read the appropriate manpages? Here's a brief index:
Basics perldata, perlvar, perlsyn, perlop, perlsub
Execution perlrun, perldebug
Various http://www.perl.com/CPAN/doc/FMTEYEWTK/index.html
(not a man-page but still useful)
-A crude table of contents for the Perl man page set is found in L<perltoc>.
+A crude table of contents for the Perl manpage set is found in L<perltoc>.
=head2 How can I use Perl interactively?
The typical approach uses the Perl debugger, described in the
-perldebug(1) man page, on an ``empty'' program, like this:
+perldebug(1) manpage, on an ``empty'' program, like this:
perl -de 42
philosophy is the philosophy of several small tools that each do one
thing and do it well. It's like a carpenter's toolbox.
-If you want a Windows IDE, check the following:
+If you want an IDE, check the following:
=over 4
-=item CodeMagicCD
-
-http://www.codemagiccd.com/
-
=item Komodo
-ActiveState's cross-platform, multi-language IDE has Perl support,
-including a regular expression debugger and remote debugging
-(http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/Komodo/index.html).
-(Visual Perl, a Visual Studio.NET plug-in is currently (early 2001)
-in beta (http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/VisualPerl/index.html)).
+ActiveState's cross-platform (as of April 2001 Windows and Linux),
+multi-language IDE has Perl support, including a regular expression
+debugger and remote debugging
+(http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/Komodo/index.html). (Visual
+Perl, a Visual Studio.NET plug-in is currently (early 2001) in beta
+(http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/VisualPerl/index.html)).
=item The Object System
(http://www.castlelink.co.uk/object_system/) is a Perl web
-applications development IDE.
+applications development IDE, apparently for any platform
+that runs Perl.
+
+=item Open Perl IDE
-=item Perl code magic
+( http://open-perl-ide.sourceforge.net/ )
+Open Perl IDE is an integrated development environment for writing
+and debugging Perl scripts with ActiveState's ActivePerl distribution
+under Windows 95/98/NT/2000.
-(http://www.petes-place.com/codemagic.html).
+=item PerlBuilder
+
+(http://www.solutionsoft.com/perl.htm) is an integrated development
+environment for Windows that supports Perl development.
=item visiPerl+
-http://helpconsulting.net/visiperl/, from Help Consulting.
+( http://helpconsulting.net/visiperl/ )
+From Help Consulting, for Windows.
+
+=back
+
+For Windows there's also the
+
+=over 4
+
+=item CodeMagicCD
+
+( http://www.codemagiccd.com/ ) Collection of various programming
+tools for Windows: Perl (5.005_03), TclTk, Python, GNU programming
+tools, REBOL, wxWindows toolkit, the MinGW GNU C/C++ compiler, DJGPP
+GNU C/C++ compiler, Cint C interpreter, YaBasic.
=back
on optimization, too. Advice on benchmarking boils down to: benchmark
and profile to make sure you're optimizing the right part, look for
better algorithms instead of microtuning your code, and when all else
-fails consider just buying faster hardware.
+fails consider just buying faster hardware. You will probably want to
+read the answer to the earlier question ``How do I profile my Perl programs?''
+if you haven't done so already.
A different approach is to autoload seldom-used Perl code. See the
AutoSplit and AutoLoader modules in the standard distribution for