Plain Old Documentation

Plain Old Documentation, abbreviated pod, is a simple markup language used to document the Perl programming language. pod is designed to be a simple, clean language with just enough syntax to be useful. It purposefully does not include mechanisms for fonts, images, colors or tables. Some of its goals are: Although the author of perlpod notes that "The Pod format is not necessarily sufficient for writing a book", books have in fact been written in... more

Plain Old Documentation, abbreviated pod, is a simple markup language used to document the Perl programming language. pod is designed to be a simple, clean language with just enough syntax to be useful. It purposefully does not include mechanisms for fonts, images, colors or tables. Some of its goals are: Although the author of perlpod notes that "The Pod format is not necessarily sufficient for writing a book", books have in fact been written in an extended version of pod; this special version included formatting codes for tables and footnotes, and is used by O'Reilly & Associates to produce several Perl books, most notably Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant. A slightly extended, modified version of pod, called mod, was used to write Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus. pod is the language used for most documentation in the Perl world. This includes Perl itself, nearly all publicly-released modules, many scripts, most design documents, many articles... less