Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
So, here's my concern. I am rather a newbie to perl (i write simple scripts, but i still mix contexts and commit other newb's crimes like using out-of-scope variables and swear that my $precious_Data appears to be empty outside of sub ;)) and i heavily relay on Monastery as well as on CPAN.
But i've ran into same problem again: documentation on CPAN does not answer my questions. Consider following example
Author mentions an 'exec' method of ssh2->channel object in example, but does not write a word what it exactly does :(. Thanks to that after heavily scrolling of this site i still don't know how to use this powerfull (i think so) module.
Of course i am fully aware that Monks are not 1st line of support for newbs, but please answer me: is documentation bad or i am missing something there?
How should i "use/read" CPAN knowledge? Should cycle through @INC and finally open SSH2.pm and analyze it line-by-line to slurp authors' wisdom? Or CPAN is just brief summary of given module and after downloading/ installing i should run it through perldoc or expect some COMPLETE_READ.me text inside tgz?
Don't get me wrong: i did not wrote this post to complain (maybye a little bit:P) but rather to ask you, those who thinks in perl, for advice in how do you actually cope with new modules; ie. do you read it's source to get full view over functionality or there's more human-friedly way.
I strongly belive in perl's power and i want to master it, but everytime when before actual run i need to look for my shoes which were tied by shoelaces to chandelier by some hoaxer, it dispirits me.