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copied!<p>Look inside almost any Perl module and you'll see the <a href="http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html" rel="noreferrer">Plain Old Documentation (POD)</a> format. On <a href="http://search.cpan.org" rel="noreferrer">CPAN Search</a>, when looking at a module you have the option of viewing the raw source, so that's one way you can look at the raw pod, but you can also use <a href="http://perldoc.perl.org/perldoc.html" rel="noreferrer">perldoc</a> from the command line. The <code>-m</code> switch shows you the file</p> <pre><code>perldoc -m Foo::Bar </code></pre> <p>Or, if you want to find the file so you can look at it in your favorite editor, use the <code>-l</code> switch to find it:</p> <pre><code>perldoc -l Foo::Bar </code></pre> <p>Once you start documenting your program, you put the Pod in the file right with the code, either interwoven with the code so the documentation is next to the relevant parts, or at the beginning, middle, or end as one big chunk.</p> <p>Pod is easily translated to several other formats, such as LaTeX, Postscript, HTML, and so on with translators that come with Perl (pod2latex, pod2ps, pod2html). I even have a pod translator that goes to InDesign. Writing your own Pod translator is easy with <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/Pod-Simple" rel="noreferrer">Pod::Simple</a>, so if you don't find a translator to your favorite final form, just make it yourself.</p> <p>There are also several tools that you can add to your test suite to check your Pod. The <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/Test-Pod" rel="noreferrer">Test::Pod</a> module checks for format errors, the <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/Test-Pod-Coverage" rel="noreferrer">Test::Pod::Coverage</a> module checks the you've documented each subroutine, and so on. You also might be interested in my <a href="http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=408254" rel="noreferrer">Perl documentation documentation</a>.</p>

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