Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Using Modules from CPAN (The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network)

If the modules in the standard Perl library don't have enough capabilities—and often, they don't—there is also CPAN. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, as I mentioned earlier, is a massive collection of publicly available modules for Perl; covering just about every topic you can imagine. Want a module to handle encrypting data? CPAN's got it. Need to send e-mail? CPAN's got a module to do that. Want to read in and process an entire HTML file? Not a problem. No matter what it is you want to do, it's a good idea to check CPAN first to see if someone has already done it for you. There's no point in reinventing the wheel when you can use someone else's code. That's the advantage ...