Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Trond Michelsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> whis
pered:
| You don't need to know any of the modules in CPAN to use perl, but once
| you learn how to use search.cpan.org, your productivity will most
| probably increase dramatically. Just like knowing how to use the
| documentation will make you more productive.
The problem with this philosophy, is that you are talking about a fullblown
software development situation. You are probably correct if I want to
write a huge application. If I just want to write a quick script to (for
example) do disk usage reporting. This was my first perl script, almost 10
years ago now. I was able to go from 0 (picking up Camel1) to having this
script completed and working in 2 days.
I just randomly chose 4 modules from the Security category. Two were dead
links (User::pwent, User::grent), one (MD5) was a wrapper that sent me
elsewhere (Digest::). It has both a functional interface and an OO
interface. The last has only an OO interface (Authen::ACE).
While I was there I (hypothetically) decided I wanted to write a web page.
I searched for Web. 112 packages in 24 distributions. To look through all
that is going to take a lot more time than I want to spend on writing a web
page. I'll just do it by hand. I was also thinking of doing some CGI.
369 modules in 81 distributions. 75% (approximately) have no synopsis
listed, so I have no idea except by name what they do.
-spp
