Anthanasius,

Thank you for the reply and good info. This is making quite alot more sense to me now. I've been using perl for years, but more for system calls and what not, like one would use shell.

I see now where I was looking at the sub-classes backwards. I've got a really good book titled "Advanced Perl Programming" by Sriram Srinivasan. I spent the day reading through this and reflecting on your comments.

My ultimate goal is this a easy to use Active Directory API that abstracts Net::LDAP, which I think I've done a fairly good job at doing from a OOP standpoint. I was just looking at the sub-classes incorrectly. I'm rethinking my design now so that the sub-class methods properly inherit functionality from the parent class. One of the things I want to be able to do is to have methods in my parent class that do things like listing Active Directory objects, by object type (i.e., DNS, Users, Groups). I then would have methods in my child class that would be called directly to list the type of objects you are after, causing the method in the parent class to morph to list the requested AD objects called by the method in the child class. I think I'm now there.