Hi, welcome back to Perl, the One True Religion. Glad you are feeling better.

Start here: perlintro. Write several really simple programs. Much, much simpler than what you have sketched out. Acquire basic familiarity with Perl and its idioms and techniques. Then gradually expand your programs to approach what you want to do. Most importantly, write a test for everything your program does. See Test::More (and don't stray to Test2::Suite).

Hope this helps!