Well I finally added the "Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition" to my Safari shelf, inspired by djabberd. Perl appears to be a great language, with so many libraries (or modules as they are called in perl) to work with.
I'm a little embarrassed, but after all these years I'm still very much a novice with perl. I've used plenty of software written in it, but I've never actually had to write any. At one point I did edit a login script which was called by ejabberd, but I really didn't know what I was doing! :-)
I'm such a newbie when it comes to perl that I'll have to look in the cookbook to find some stuff to learn about!
One thing I have been wondering about is finding perl dependencies. I found ScanDep, which finds all the perl modules which a perl module depends on, and then someone on the perl.beginners usenet group told me about the Perl Archive Toolkit. There is a variation on the scandeps.pl function I tried before which output file dependencies as well as module dependencies:
scandeps.pl -V -e "use DJabberd.pm"
Previously I thought it would only output modules.