How to work under the hood with the ldms_* utilities.

• ActiveState Perl. I still use 5.8, but I've been preparing for a move to 5.10. This is the language distribution; with it and the right modules (loaded by using the Perl Package Manager) you can run the programs in source code form. There are a lot of modules you'll need to run the programs with; for developing, you'll want to grab Perl::Critic and Perl::Tidy, and maybe Devel::SmallProf or Devel::NYTProf.
•  
    
  • Perl::Critic analyzes your source code for maintainability
    
  • Perl::Tidy reformats your source code for readability. Both of these are based on Damian Conway's    Perl Best Practices  
      
   
• ActiveState Perl Dev Kit. I use this, version 7.3, instead of the full studio for two reasons. It's cheaper, and I don't use the IDE. If you're more familiar with Microsoft Visual Studio and want something similar, that's the ActivePerl Pro Studio. The PDK's main job is to compile Perl code into a Windows executable file (.exe).
  
• Instead, I use  vim. It may be arcane, but I know how to use it, it's available on every computer operating system, and it includes all sorts of handy tools for development support. If you don't know vi and don't want to learn it, ActiveState provides a free source code editor called  Komodo Edit. Using some sort of source code editor is crucial, if only for syntax highlighting. You'll also want the  taglist plugin and the  perl support plugin. Compare the readability of these two screenshots, and imagine trying to find a subtle typo in notepad.

• Nullsoft Installer System. Packaging is complex, and I've barely scratched the surface of NSIS, but it's free and functional. There are also a lot of examples out there to follow.