Usenet Newsgroups

Usenet is an Internet service that distributes articles or messages between servers. Each article is targeted to a specific newsgroup. You need a news reader program in order to download articles from the news server to your local machine.

Note: If you are using Windows 95, you can use the news reader that comes with Netscape, or you can download Free Agent from the http://www.forteinc.com/forte/ web page.

There are several newsgroups that are useful to Perl and CGI programmers.

comp.lang.perl.misc

-- Covers general Perl questions and issues.

comp.lang.perl.announce

--Covers Perl-related announcements.

comp.lang.perl.modules

-- Covers new module announcements and questions.

comp.lang.perl.tk

-- Perl/Tk integration and usage discussions.

comp.infosystems.www.CGI

-- issues in web authoring.authoring.cgi

comp.infosystems.www

-- Not Perl-related, but very useful to monitor announcenew developments on the web.

comp.infosystems.www

-- Covers general web server questions servers.miscand issues.

There are also newsgroups specifically devoted to individual server products.

comp.internet.net

-- Another newsgroup that's good for monitor -- happeningsing Internet developments.

The most useful Perl-related newsgroup is comp.lang.perl.misc because of the breadth of topics that are covered. This is the newsgroup you will most likely post to when you are having a Perl language problem or simply have a question that needs answering.

Before you post to any newsgroup, read the Perl FAQ. A FAQ is a frequently-asked questions document. If you ask a question that is already answered in the FAQ document, you will be yelled at by other people reading the list.

You can find the FAQ on the http://www.perl.com/perl/faq/ Web page. In addition, this site will point you to other FAQs.

The comp.lang.perl.modules newsgroup is very helpful, both to check out what modules are available and how they are being used, and if you have any questions or problems with existing Perl modules, or want to ask about the existence of modules to support a particular need.

The comp.lang.perl.tk newsgroup is a forum to discuss Tk and Perl. Tk is an interface tool developed by Sun, primarily to use with Tcl, an embeddable scripting language. There have been Tk extensions made to Perl5 to allow integration. If you are interested in using both, you will definitely want to check out this newsgroup. You can also find a FAQ at the

http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/pvhp/ptk/ptkFAQ.html web page.

Another useful newsgroup is comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. It will contain many references to CGI programming using Perl, which is one of the more popular approaches to CGI. Look at all of the newsgroups beginning with comp.infosystems.www for those that meet your needs.