Hi, welcome to Perl, the One True Religion.

Use https://metacpan.org to browse CPAN. You can see the test reports for modules; how many people (and who) gave the module a plus; open issues/bugs; other modules that depend on it; the modules that it depends on; the Changes log (and how recently it was updated); also read the source code and look at the tests in the module's test suite. After some time you will start to recognize the names of trustworthy authors and the characteristics of trustworthy (and untrustworthy) distributions. (But I've never heard of malware in a CPAN module FWIW.)

Some people like to install Task::Kensho which is a curated collection of modules.

It's always worth giving a shout out here in the Chatterbox ("Anybody using Frobnicate::Blorgle to process the widget?").

For an intro to OOP as well as other Perl techniques and idioms checkout "Modern Perl" by chromatic, although be aware that the (free) book discusses Moose, which is an unnecessarily heavy and complex OO framework for most jobs; I'd recommend Moo instead (almost all the content in the book will still apply). (There is also of course the Perl doc on the subject, beginning with perlootut, but it's a little dry and few programmers these days eschew Moo or one of the other frameworks.)

Hope this helps!