Any advice?

Include the code sample as you've written it, what you expect to get, and what you actually get. :P

I can't seem to get the examples to work. Any advice?

Sacrifice a goat beverage :/

Also, there are checklists for that , Basic debugging checklist , brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem, CGI Help Guide , Troubleshooting Perl CGI scripts

Yes, work through these checklists, when you find a problem on the list, use a solution from the list, when you find a problem not on the list (rare), post the error message and problem description here

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

So examine your server configuration and compare to https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/public_html.html#cgi / Apache Tutorial: Dynamic Content with 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.

In case you are working on Windows, XAMPP contains examples. Only a few, but working examples.

Update: You did not specify wether you are fighting against syntax terror or wether you do not know how to run CGI programs. I presume the latter, so I second the advice from our anonymous confrere, especially the points at the end of that post.

(And even if you are interested in web programming, CGI has become mostly outmoded and you might want to learn a modern framework instead. But those things' documentation expect you to already know the nuts and bolts of WWW...)