Perl rocks, it’s easily my favorite programming language. One of the nice things about Perl is the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). Your Linux box has CPAN installed already, and to begin using it you should first update it. To do so run the commands just below. The first time you invoke CPAN it’ll launch the configuration module, just hit enter until it gets into the part about which mirrors you want to use, it’ll have you pick geographic areas first, and then tell you to enter servers by number, separated by spaces. I usually put in about 20 servers, which looks like kinda this

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

#invoke perl’s CPAN shell (and first time configuration with)
bash$ perl -MCPAN -e shell
#once configuration is done, update CPAN, and then reload
CPAN> install Bundle::CPAN
CPAN> reload cpan

Now, head on over to CPAN and search for some cool new Perl modules to play with!

A great place to dive into the world of Perl is Perl.org

Also the Perl Monks is a good Perl site, and Use Perl is as well.

Make sure you have a correct build environment setup, on Ubuntu/Debian you need to install the build-essential package (sudo apt-get install build-essential)