I have been thinking recently that it would be so cool if there were a Mastering CPAN book, both for CPAN users and for CPAN authors. The best way to get the job done with CPAN is sometimes just so non-obvious. Such a book would be useful both for newcomers who still feel intimidated by CPAN as well as for more experienced users looking to learn some neat advanced techniques. A sample Table of Contents may look like this:

Part I: Using CPAN

Basics - what is CPAN, who hosts it, who contributes to it, etc.

Finding stuff on CPAN

Installing stuff from CPAN, CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS.pm, other shells, manual installation, PPM packages and repositories, .deb and .rpm packages, ActiveState Perl vs Strawberry Perl, compiling modules on Win32 with AS Perl and Visual Studio Express, understanding the overwhelming output of the cpan shell and figuring out which messages are important, failed tests and forced installs

Structure of a CPAN distribution, info you can find in META.yml, finding usage examples in the tests directory

Reporting bugs and finding support for a module

Creating your local minicpan, running a webserver for pod documentation

Advanced commands in the cpan shell, creating bundles for all of your installed modules, other local maintenance tasks

Other useful tools and websites: cpan testers, cpan dependencies, annocpan, cpanhq, diff and grep on search.cpan.org

Part II: Authoring CPAN Modules