David Landgren
<david@landgren.net>

Founder, Paris Perl Mong(u)e\g{-1}rs
grinder on IRC

• Without writing modules.

• But how do you start using CPAN?

• "I just want to parse some XML"

• How do you find the good modules

• You don't know Perl until you know CPAN

• 3400+ authors

• 12000+ modules

• The good, the bad and the ugly

• The Phalanx 100 is a starting point

• http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/100/

• Adam Kennedy (ADAMK) has released 150 modules.

• It is likely that some of them are useful.

• Tatsuhiko Miyagawa (MIYAGAWA) has released 126.

• Ditto.

• There is a website that tracks this.

• Simon Wistow munged some CPAN metadata

• and produced the CPAN Leaderboard

• http://www.thegestalt.org/simon/perl/wholecpan.html

• As good a place to start as any when plunging into CPAN.

• Static analysis of code (think grep)

• Common mistakes to avoid when writing modules for CPAN

• Some criteria are of dubious merit

• But I uploaded a distribution whose MANIFEST lacked MANIFEST

• http://cpants.perl.org/highscores/many

• Does what you need.

• Almost.

• Found a bug, fixed a bug, added some functionality.

• Open a ticket on rt.cpan.org via the web interface.

• https://rt.cpan.org/Public/

• or mailto:bug-dist-name@rt.cpan.org

• Except if the author is Ilya Zakharevich...

• No examples or ambiguous examples

• You can add your own annotations to the module.

• And then everyone else benefits.

• http://www.annocpan.org/

• Deals with the POD, not the code.

• If you do come across a module that works...

• ... or doesn't.

• Write about your experience, give your opinion, give it a rating.

• Read what other people have said.

• http://cpanratings.perl.org/

• You can even rate the ratings!

• http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/

• Has a section on Recommended CPAN Modules

• Evidently subjective, but you could do worse than follow the recommendations.

• It's a wiki, you can contribute.

• New website by Skud and Petdance

• News and events in the Perl world

• Has a section on significant new CPAN releases

• http://perlbuzz.com/cpan-watch/

• Not all modules have their own discussion mailing list

• Each CPAN module has its own web discussion forum

• But the conversation threading sucks

• Hot new topic: tagging. The more the better

• Add your own tags

• http://www.cpanforum.com/

• The social aspect of CPAN is what makes it work.

• Know the people, know the modules.

• "As I've done for a great many other programming languages, I've bashed on Perl's technical weaknesses at length in the past. To my continued amazement, the Perl folks are the only ones who never get upset. They just say "Haha, yeah, boy, you're right, it sure is ugly. Heh. Yeah, so, um, anyway, I'm going to get back to work now..." -- Steve Yegge

• The End, thank-you.