I know enough to know when I've been down a road before and have met without success and will likely be tearing my hair out for no good reason. The solution I found was not on that man page because things were complicated by the fact that I had used the debian package system to install mysql. The man page simply does not cover that scenario. And I know just about jack about the debian packaging system to be able to figure out a workaround on my own. See what worked below.

This is not a work around as you claim. The documentation I linked to clearly states prerequisites you had not satisfied. The error thrown when trying to install tells you what file can't be found. A Google search for the error or if you don't know how to use your package management tool to search for things (of course there's documentation available to explain how to do that) would find what you needed. Nobody is born knowing this. There simply is no magic.

If you barely know algebra2, it's hard to grok a math book where parts of it are written for those familiar with calculus.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks

The workaround has worked for me. I'm not getting any more script errors about not being able to connect to the database.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks