Herrmann DOES encourage using strict and -w. It's one of the first things he mentions near the beginning of the book, before teaching how to code. The whole second chapter of the book is dedicated to debugging, making your code easier to debug, how to follow "Good Coding Practices", and "Avoiding Common Perl 5 Mistakes". It also shows how to debug in Emacs, in ActiveState Windows Debugger, and Debugging CGI programs.

Yes, it does explain all the return values of localtime (page 862). An array that contains the following in order:

The seconds from 0 to 60

The minutes from 0 to 60

The hour of the day from 1 to 12

The day of the month from 1 to 31

The month of the year from 0 to 11

The year in four-digit format

The day of the week from 0 to 6

The day of the year from 1 to 365

Whether or not it is daylight saving time (1 indicates true)

Sorry no CGI.pm that I've seen. Herrmann shows how to roll your own CGI scripts, and how to decode the HTTP headers yourself (and what it actually is doing). Later on, it shows how to protect your CGI scripts from possibly being exploited by hackers by filtering meta-characters from text entries, which can be used to escape the CGI code and start shell commands on the server.

CPAN? Yes indeed. At the time this book was written, Herrmann referred to it as ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/perl/CPAN/ in the introduction of the book (unfortunately this address has been depreciated since then). Other websites and Perl newsgroups are also listed.

The book also shows some pretty nifty advanced Windows things, like how to load DLL's and call their functions, and calling the Win32 API functions. Please don't tell me that this is beginner stuff...