Use standard Perl modules
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-06-25 07:04:54 - Graham EllisIf you're writing a piece of code and you think "surely someone has done this before", then you're probably right. Chances are that someone has written the code, debugged it, tested it, documented it, and may even maintain it and have a lot of facilities that you would love to have but cannot justify in terms of your development time. And with Open Source, chances are that you'll be able to use the code that's already been written by someone else!.
As well as built-in functionallity, Perl is supplied with a wide range of very commonly required modules - things like Time::Local for converting times from seconds, minutes, hours, day, month, year into a number of seconds from 1.1.70 (so that you can calculate with times). There's a further wide variety available on the CPAN at www.cpan.org, and probably even more in your own organisation. And don't forget standard appliactions either - such as YaBB which we use for our forum and Movabletype which I use for these daily writings.