These are the places to go trolling for further information, should this chapter not slake your thirst:
perlguts documentation. Jeff Okamoto and others.
The perlguts documentation, along with perlembed and perlcall, is a fairly exhaustive source of information. The API reference in this document contains many more functions and macros than are covered in this chapter.
Perl 5 Porters news gateway and archive.
The perl.porters-gw Usenet newsgroup is a gateway to the p5p mailing list, where vigorous discussions of Perl internals overshadow porting issues. Archived articles can be searched at http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/Perl5-Porters/
XS Cookbooks. Dean Roehrich.
These cookbooks, available from CPAN (look under the authors/Dean_Roehrich directory), provide solutions to a number of sample problems covering all XS features.
sfio (Safe/Fast I/O Library). David Korn and Kiem-Phong Vo.
Faster, extensible, and an overall better alternative to stdio, with backward compliance to stdio. Works only on Unix. Get it from CPAN's Misc directory, or check the following URL for a summary: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/reuse/packages/sfio.html
Perl compiler. Fetch from CPAN's authors/Malcolm_Beattie/ directory.
The Road goes ever on and on
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings