It's a hell of a lot nicer than my first Perl program, that's for sure. I learned Perl by dissecting scripts I found on the web, so I picked up all the bad practices involved with that(imagine learning from Matt Wright's scripts, and other such scripts available on the web). I didn't use strict or warnings, all global variables, stole a CGI parsing routine(one very similar to this, with some tweaks I added of my own), used nothing but flatfile ascii databases with "|:|" or some other uncommon string separating fields... It was a nightmare.

Be thankful you started out on the right path, it took me a long time to learn the error of my ways and become comfortable with the concepts that I should have been learning from the beginning(thank god for Coping with Scoping, that's all I can say).