in reply to Problem understanding how to use modules

Somewhat along the lines of bart's comment;

If I were you. I'd create a folder in your Home dir, along the lines of:
~/lib

Then you can unpack your modules into a temp folder, and 

cd /tmp/ModuleName
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install PREFIX=~/lib

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Some suggest that you should indicate PREFIX= when you issue perl Makefile.PL eg; 
perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=~/lib

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But I've never had any issues simply issuing it during the make install process.

Best wishes

--Chris

OH. One more thing. Do remember to include the lib dir in your programs (@INC) (Perl scripts), eg; 

use lib ('~/lib');

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#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom