Thousands have done it this year alone I imagine. Choose LWP::Simple and then
my $content = get("https://servername.com"). There's a million other ways to do it perhaps. What do you mean by "authenticate?" I understand there's a way to login over ssl. I suspect it'll turn out to be an LWP builtin.
In any case, I doubt you'll have to read much of the SSL docs and will find almost everything in the LWP docs.
If you're intending to automate the process of uploading or downloading files (or something of that nature), you should probably check out WWW::Mechanize, which will do all the http and ssl for you and provide helpers to make that even simpler to do.
