• Social CPAN : Finding the best and most popular modules
• The Perl Best Practices book makes some recommendations
• See Core modules at Perl documentation

Some commonly-used built-in modules:

List::Util
Getopt::Long
Test::More
Cwd
Data::Dumper
File::Find
File::Temp
File::Basename

Some commonly-used pragmas:

strict
warnings
autodie
diagnostics

Some commonly-used modules from the CPAN:

List::MoreUtils
DateTime
File::Slurp
Moose

I rarely PLUS posts from Anonymous Monk, but mentioning Test::More causes an exception :)


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

As others say, they is no canonical answer, but FWIW here are some I end up using often

Data::Dumper # Oh yes, use this one a lot
DBI
LWP
JSON
POSIX
Time::HiRes
File::Find
Data::Dumper # did I mention that one yet ;)
[download]

Threads
Thread::Queue
POE
[download]

Cheers,
R.

There is no definite answer: CPAN is HUGE and stuffed with superb modules. What is most commonly used completely depends on the task at hand. Start with specifying your target area:

• Database
• GUI programming
• Networking
• (raw) data conversions
• Games
• Web programming
• (web) services
• En-/De-cryption
• (Heavy) calculation
• …

littlemonk:

As you can see from the other responses, it depends on the problems you tend to need to solve. Having said that, my list of "indispensible modules" is: Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, DBI, DBD::ODBC, DBD::Oracle, and DBD::SQLite. There are dozens of others that I also like to use, but since I do a lot of data spelunking and generating reports for users, these are the ones that I use in most of my projects.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

Tell us more about what you do with your programming and we might be able to point you at some helpful modules.

I kind of got the feeling that he is a gamer used to things like "Hey, what mods should i use for Skyrim" and then applied that kind of thinking to Perl.

Another good place to start looking is Task::Kensho, which is

...a first cut at building a list of recommended modules....
The modules that are bundled by Task::Kensho ... are all taken from various top 100 most used perl modules lists and from discussions with various subject matter experts in the Perl Community.

The non-core module I use most often is Data::Dump, which I prefer to Data::Dumper.

Hope that helps,

I've found some real gems from Perl Advent Calendars. I check it every year. See http://www.perladvent.org for the most recent one. Tack on a year (e.g. http://www.perladvent.org/2012 to see previous year's.

I also like to check on whatever Damian Conway has been working on recently. Data::Show, for example has been one of my favorites.

I think this is a reasonable question; the choices of CPAN modules is overwhelming, and yet there are some modules that I use frequently.

use Getopt::Long;  # I use this in all my programs
use Carp qw(cluck confess);
use Time::HiRes;   # I wish this was Perl's default
use Win32;         # When I need to call a Win32 DLL
use XML::LibXML;   # Meets all my XML needs; See also XML::SemanticDif
+f
use LWP;           # LWP & friends for web stuff
use Exporter;      # For writing my own modules
use IO::Handle;

# Some less frequently used favorites
use Term::ANSIColor;  # The world is better in color
use Socket;        # When you need to do your own socket thing
use DateTime::Format::* # For date/time processing
[download]

I hope that helps.

I would like to add Text::CSV to the lists mentioned above.