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Map of CPAN

mapofcpan.org

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Another visualisation of CPAN can be found at CPAN Explorer: http://cpan-explorer.org/

Really cool! And so grateful that Perl/CPAN has great name spacing conventions to make this possible.

Here's the original post on PerlMonks: http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=943704

Good to see Acme right up there with the big players.

for the lazy but unenlightened, Acme namespace is reserved for fun modules.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#CPAN_Acme

I'm kinda new to perl, what's the best way to figure out what a lot of these packages actually do? The content of the readme's are hit or miss for quite a few. I'd be curious if there's a collection of CPAN modules complete with helpful abstracts. Or maybe just point me to the right place, if I'm missing something.

Most people don't generate a README file. Instead, read the POD, which for a distribution Foo-Bar is usually located somewhere like http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Foo::Bar

Install cpandoc[1]. It's supercharged perldoc command.

It lets you explore the CPAN ecosystem without installing the modules.

  $ cpandoc XML::Twig
  [ ... documentation for XML::Twig ...]

[1] Coincidentally, today's Perl Advent article covers cpandoc (http://perladvent.org/2011/2011-12-15.html).

If you click on the name in the top-left corner, you'll be taken to metapan.org. Click on a module under "Modules" to view its documentation. The first module is often the "main" one.

There are also Tasks::*, such as [1], at CPAN that can be a good start when you're looking for modules for a particular purpose.

[1]: https://metacpan.org/module/Task::Kensho

This, kids, is the other reason we use Perl.

... because CPAN is the only package index with a map visualization?

edit: That map visualization seems to show CPAN package namespaces sized relative to the rest of CPAN. This does nothing to visualize the size of CPAN itself, therefore I don't see how "That's why we use Perl" is a valid comment in response to this visualization seeing as it seems to be implying that they use Perl because of the breadth/depth of CPAN.

Have you tried mousing over the pixels?

I think I can see my house!

Very cool

nice!

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