If you're reading this edition of PerlMonth then it's a fair bet that you are already aware of Perl's usefulness, flexibility and just all-round coolness. It is, however, a little more likely that you are unaware that within its distribution, Perl contains what is probably the best set of free documentation for any software currently available. In this article I want to introduce those of you who are less familar with the Perl documentation to the huge amount of information that it contains and how it can almost certainly make your coding life easier. Obviously with such a massive documentation set, this can only be the most cursory of tours, so hang on to your hats. The documentation is in the form of a number of POD files.
POD stands for plain old documentation and is a simple text-based format.
It's human-readable, so that if you really want to you can just open the files in your favourite text editor. This probably isn't the best way to access them though and the standard Perl distribution supplies a number of better tools. The simplest, and most often used, of these tools is perldoc . Typing perldoc perl on your command line will display the contents of the introductory POD file, which is called perl.pod. This is basically a list of all of the other POD files and what they contain.