Also, be aware that Perl has now been "objectified", so it has a bunch of things like abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.
In short, it's not quite the simple "scripting" language it used to be.
If you're new to the concepts of objects and the above object "stuff", you should really find a couple of books to help with wrapping your head around objects. Rather different programming style than C or other linear languages.
3 books I recommend are:
Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
Bruce Eckel's "Thinking In Java" (
http://mindview.net/Books/TIJ4) (might be Java, but does a great job of teaching how to think in an object-based language, and most applies to Perl... also has a free on-line electronic version of the book).
Object Oriented Perl.
It seems to me that this is the biggest problem with most Perl apps that I've encountered... they fail to do "objects" the proper way in both design and implementation.
And good design patterns books go without saying.
$0.02