The other thing I can recommend is, get familiar with CPAN. Learnt to use the CPAN shell to install modules. Someone else has spent a fair bit of time and intellectual energy creating this varied collection of masterpieces, and there really is something for everyone.

I tried to use PDF::API2 and could not get it to work. I gave up on it for a while, when discovered that good old pair Networks had already installed PDF::API2::Lite and got it to work. The bad news is that the documentation sucks; the good news is that I can more or less get it to work, since creating PDFs is one of the things I need to do to support my singing hobby.

I still want to get the module working on my home system, since pair's CPU limiting doodads cut in whenever I run the Perl debugger on that module, but that's miles better than not being to produce PDFs at all.