How Is CPAN Organized?

CPAN materials are grouped into categories, including Perl modules, distributions, documentation, announcements, ports, scripts, and contributing authors. Each category is linked to related categories. For example, links to a graphing module written by an author appear in both the module and the author areas.

Since CPAN provides the same offerings worldwide, the directory structure has been standardized; files are located in the same place in the directory hierarchy at all CPAN sites. All CPAN sites use CPAN as the root directory, from which the user can select a specific Perl item. From the CPAN directory, you have the following choices:

While most people who want to use Perl for Win32 should use ActivePerl from www.activestate.com, if you want to roll your own, you can get the current Perl source kit from the src directory and click on stable.tar.gz (or stable.zip, if you're building under Win32). If you want to stand on the cutting edge of Perl development, you should download devel.tar.gz (or devel.zip, if you're building under Win32). For ports to other systems, click on ports. The modules link is the one you want if you're looking for a Perl module. From there, you can get a full list of the modules or access the modules directly by author, by CPAN category, or by module name. ("Getting and Installing Modules" later in this chapter talks about installing modules.) Click on doc for Perl documentation, FAQs, etc.