Here's a guide: José's Guide for creating Perl modules.

What are the advantages of Module::Starter over h2xs?

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

"Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."

It's more up-to-date with current practices for CPAN. It can generate Module::Build support, makes better starter tests, generates the YAML file, has stub POD that's more useful for modern OO modules, etc. h2xs also generates some strange file layouts, as discussed here in the past.

Better yet, if you want to write more than about 2 modules, just write your own. h2xs adds more useless junk with every Perl release, and Module::Starter seems no better. When you write your own, you type in all and only the boilerplate you want when you write it, and you don't have extraneous garbage inserted when you create future modules. Here's what I use:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use Getopt::Long;

$ME = q|WHATEVER|;

sub usage
{
    print STDERR <<'EOS';
Usage: newmod.pl [-u 'Name <user@host>'] Module::Name
EOS
    exit 1;
}

GetOptions('user:s' => \$ME) && @ARGV == 1 or usage;

$mod = shift;
($dir = $mod) =~ s/::/-/g;
mkdir $dir or die $!;
chdir $dir;

sub cat
{
    my $o = shift;
    open OUT, ">$o" or die $!;
    print OUT $_ for @_;
    close OUT;
}

($file = $mod) =~ s/.*:://;

cat 'Makefile.PL', <<EOS;
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;

WriteMakefile(
    NAME              => '$mod',
    VERSION_FROM      => '$file.pm',
    PREREQ_PM         => { },
    (\$] >= 5.005 ?     ## Add these new keywords supported since 5.00
+5
      (AUTHOR         => q|$ME|) : ()),
    ABSTRACT          => 'Something.',
);
EOS

cat "$file.pm", <<EOS;
package $mod;

=head1 NAME

$mod -- Whatever it does...

=head1 SYNOPSIS



=cut

\$VERSION = '0.01';

1;
__END__

=head1 DESCRIPTION



=head1 AUTHOR

${ME}

Bug reports welcome, patches even more welcome.

=head1 COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) $y $ME.  All rights reserved, some wrongs reversed.
This module is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.

=cut
EOS

cat "test.pl", <<EOS;
use Test::Simple tests => 1;
use $mod;
ok(1, 'loaded');
EOS

(undef, undef, undef, $d, $m, $y) = localtime;
$y += 1900;
cat "ChangeLog", <<EOS;
$y-$m-$d  $ME
    * original version; created by newmod.pl
EOS

cat "README", <<EOS;
$mod version 0.01

INSTALLATION

To install this module, run the following commands:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install


DEPENDENCIES

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) $y, $ME

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.
EOS

cat 'MANIFEST', <<EOS;
Makefile.PL
MANIFEST
README
test.pl
$file.pm
EOS
[download]

That looks fine, but Module::Starter is totally customizable. Search CPAN for examples of what others have done.