So you copy/pasted from http://web.archive.org/web/20100824075511/http://jdporter.perlmonk.org/cgi_course/lesson_1.html, changed things around, and now it doesn't work

Here is a tip, copy paste from lesson1 and save into a newfile, then compare, line by line, newfile to yourfile

diff -ub newfile yourfile

or gvim -d -g -R -y newfile yourfile

or gvim -g -y -O newfile yourfile

If that isn't clear enough, use Deparse tip from Basic debugging checklist ), and make Deparse-s of newfile/yourfile, and compare those

Basically, more Basic debugging checklist all the time

more checklists CGI Help Guide , Troubleshooting Perl CGI scripts , brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem

on learning CGI learn about the internet,Web Programming: For Beginners, to get an overall picture of how the internet works, how tcp/ip, sockets, html, ajax, all fit together.

On PSGI or modern-easy-cgi see http://perldancer.org/slides Dancer - Perl Web Framework for easy and fun webapp development

and Mojolicious - Perl real-time web framework/http://mojocasts.com/