Knowing your way around CPAN is easy: interesting top level
directories are just authors, modules and src (perhaps
scripts too now).
You can find a module either by knowing its author
(authors/id/TOMC or authors/Tom_Christiansen), its name
(modules/by-name/Net/), or the category its in
(modules/by-category/14_Security_and_Encryption).
http://search.cpan.org can save you a lot of time.