Use LWP and ignore all the socket business. I've copied an example right from the documentation I linked to.

  # Create a user agent object
  use LWP::UserAgent;
  $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
  $ua->agent("MyApp/0.1 ");

  # Create a request
  my $req = HTTP::Request->new(POST => 'http://www.perl.com/cgi-bin/Bu
+gGlimpse');
  $req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
  $req->content('match=www&errors=0');

  # Pass request to the user agent and get a response back
  my $res = $ua->request($req);

  # Check the outcome of the response
  if ($res->is_success) {
      print $res->content;
  } else {
      print "Bad luck this time\n";
  }
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If all you need to do is simple web scraping, WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TableExtract might be of interest to you as well. WWW::Mechanize offers you a browser-like API, while HTML::TableExtract offers you an easy way to extract rows from HTML tables.

A module written by me is WWW::Mechanize::Shell, which offers you a command line browser that can output a Perl program recreating all actions done by you.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

use IO::Socket;

$www = IO::Socket::INET->new(
   PeerAddr => 'some_host_or_ip',
   PeerPort => '80_or_whatever_port_http_is_on',
   Proto    => 'tcp',
   Type     => SOCK_STREAM
) || die "Cant connect to some_host_or_ip\n$!\n";

print $www "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n";

while (<$www>) {
   push(@response, $_);
}

close($www);
print "Got Back\n";
for (@response) {
    print;
}
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