It's an interesting idea. Conway's book really got my brain going in a way none of my other 30 Perl books did. I think, however, the newish kits approach the problem-space... maybe not holistically but with a wide view. So, hard to say. Doing it manually, aka the hard way, will certainly improve your appreciation for the tools and rationale for the OO-frameworks.

I'm thinking I should learn "old school" OO Perl for now before taking on Moo and Moose. Is that a good idea?

Neither :) see High level OOP query

Then skim through perlobj and perlootut

"old school" or Moo... that is the easy part (less typing or more typing) :)

The hard part is knowing When to Use OO and how to model your classes

Like Modern Perl says Creating and using objects in Perl with Moose (Moose, pp. 107) is easy. Designing good programs is not. It's as easy to overdesign a program as it is to underdesign it....

So to summarize, you are saying, "first learn when to use and apply OO design?"

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