Morning Monks

This isn't really a detailed technical question, it's more a "accepted norm" query. As I have thought myself Perl without any immediate "go-to" person (there is nobody in my work environment that knows anything about coding!) I find I that I am struggling with coding practices and principles a lot.

I have recently moved from small (under 1000 lines) scripts to larger, modular, OOP projects. I won't lie, I am finding the concept a little difficult, especially coming from a non-coding background! Anyway, my question involves the creation of an instance and specifically how acceptable it is to modify it. Example:

Suppose this simple code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Storm;
use Data::Dumper;

my $config = {
        storm_server        =>    '172.16.0.55',
        storm_port            =>    '9001',
        storm_auth_login    =>    '0',
        storm_login            =>    '1',
        storm_user            =>    'stormuser',
        storm_pass            =>    'pass',
    };

my $self = Storm->new($config);

print Dumper $self;

package Storm;

use IO::Socket;

sub new {
    my $class    =     shift;
    my $self    =    shift;
    # The next lines, should this be here or in another 
        # method
                    if( $self->{storm_auth_login} ) {
            $self->{append_text} = "X12-"
            }
        
        
    bless $self, $class;
    return $self;
}

[download]
As you can see I am creating an instance with a $config hash ref with certain information. However, is it the "norm / acceptable", as above, to check the argument and based on a value then modify it.
OR, is it better/normal to create a "blank" instance and then pass that into another method to change/modify?
OR, the third option: I am getting way to bogged down on what is the "norm" and I should worry more about my apparent lack of understanding of how OOP works!

In reply to High level OOP query by packetstormer

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