"However, from outside the class, it's normally preferred to abstract it and go through accessors"

Even from inside the class, you should access fields/attributes via the accessors. Otherwise you'll make life harder for yourself if/when you need to subclass your class.

"a good starting point is probably perlootut"

w00t! I just noticed that as of Perl 5.20, this document links to one of my modules. :-)