We give an explicit treatment of cubic function fields of characteristic at least five. This includes an efficient technique for converting such a field into standard form, formulae for the field discriminant and the genus, simple necessary and sufficient criteria for non-singularity of the defining curve, and a characterization of all triangular integral bases. Our main result is a description of the signature of any rational place in a cubic extension that involves only the defining curve and the order of the base field. All these quantities only require simple polynomial arithmetic as well as a few square-free polynomial factorizations and, in some cases, square and cube root extraction modulo an irreducible polynomial. We also illustrate why and how signature computation plays an important role in computing the class number of the function field. This in turn has applications to the study of zeros of zeta functions of function fields.

For an arbitrary finite Galois $p$-extension $L/K$ of $\zp$-cyclotomic number fields of $\CM$-type with Galois group $G = \Gal(L/K)$ such that the Iwasawa invariants $\mu_K^-$, $ \mu_L^-$ are zero, we obtain unconditionally and explicitly the Galois module structure of $\clases$, the minus part of the $p$-subgroup of the class group of $L$. For an arbitrary finite Galois $p$-extension $L/K$ of algebraic function fields of one variable over an algebraically closed field $k$ of characteristic $p$ as its exact field of constants with Galois group $G = \Gal(L/K)$ we obtain unconditionally and explicitly the Galois module structure of the $p$-torsion part of the Jacobian variety $J_L(p)$ associated to $L/k$.