To avoid buffered read and writes use sysread and syswrite. There is information on these in the IO::Socket and IO::Select perldoc. The big advantage of these is that you can do non-blocking access. The down-side is that they are a hair more complex.

An excellent source of all the networking that is Perl is Lincoln Stein's excellent Network Programming with Perl. You can figure this stuff out with just the perldoc, though.

Good luck,
{NULE}
--
http://www.nule.org

P.S. I'm at a training class all week so I don't have much opportunity to research my posts as well as I normally do. Forgive me for not providing links to all of the things that I mention here.