| In addition to books and Web sites, Network Programming with Perl refers to two major sources of online information, Internet RFCs and Perl POD documentation. Internet RFCs The specifications of all the fundamental protocols of the Internet are described in a series of Requests for Comment (RFC) submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). These documents are numbered sequentially. For example RFC 1927 ”"Suggested Additional MIME Types for Associating Documents" ”was the 1927th RFC submitted. Some of these RFCs eventually become Internet Standards, in which case they are given sequentially numbered STD names . However, most of them remain RFCs. Even though the RFCs are unofficial , they are the references that people use to learn the details of networking protocols and to validate that a particular implementation is correct. The RFC archives are mirrored at many locations on the Internet, and maintained in searchable form by several organizations. One of the best archives is maintained at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/. To retrieve an RFC from this site, go to the indicated page and type the number of the desired RFC in the text field labeled "Display the document by number." The document will be delivered in a minimally HTMLized form. This page also allows you to search for standards documents, and to search the archive by keywords and phrases. If you prefer a text-only form, the http://www.faqs.org/ site contains a link to their FTP site, where you can find and download the RFCs in their original form. Plain Old Documentation Much of Perl's internal documentation comes in Plain Old Documentation (POD) format. These are mostly plain text, with a few markup elements inserted to indicate headings, subheadings , and itemized lists. When you installed Perl, the POD documentation was installed as well. The POD files are located in the pod subdirectory of the Perl library directory. You can either read them directly, or use the perldoc script to format and display them in a text pager such as more . To use perldoc type the command and the name of the POD file you wish to view. The best place to start is the Perl table of contents, perltoc: % perldoc perltoc This will give you a list of other POD pages that you can display. For a quick summary of a particular Perl function, perldoc accepts the -f flag. For example, to see a summary of the socket() function, type: % perldoc -f socket For Macintosh user 's the MacPerl distribution comes with a "helper" application called shuck . This adds POD viewing facilities to the MacPerl Help menu.  | 
