Perl Debugged

1.5. Online Documentation

Fortunately, the documentation included with perl covers practically everything you could want to know about Perl. Unfortunately, practically everything you could want to know about Perl is an awful lot. Yet with a little guidance, you can very quickly learn how to navigate around it and save yourself gobs of time compared to the alternatives. The documentation is in the POD (Plain Old Documentation) format, a very simple markup language that's part of Perl.

Knowing your way around the documentation is an essential debugging tool. Because this is such an important point, we call attention to it with a device we use throughout this book for highlighting such tips, pompously called Perls of Wisdom:

Know the documentation. ...