Welcome. This question is great in so much as the modern alternatives are much nicer/easier to work with, so I'm really glad you you asked/posted. Firstly, many universities have webpages associated with their courses, so there's a good chance the actual example code shown here (I gave up watching a little of the way in, honestly no disrespect to anyone intended) may be available online in a sane, downloadable format.

When I talk about nicer/easier ways to work I really mean tools that make the task at hand easier to maintain, more fun to work with and as far as I'm concerned easier to learn/teach. I'd suggest you look at Mojo::DOM which is simply fantastic for working with web based data, along with Mojo::UserAgent. The two can be combined easily as seen in some examples below. Mojolicious has fantastic documentation and examples to get you started with modern web development in perl. Here are some examples/answers to posts here I've implemented in using the above tools. Some are sub optimal and I may get round to updating them one day.

• Re: Batch remove URLs. A user asks how to check links on their site (locally, though making it work remotely is trivial) and mark them as not found/not available. I show a mojo based solution for finding all links and checking they exist.
• Download free Microsoft ebooks, fun with Mojolicious and CSS selectors. An example of using a somewhat complex selector to match just what we want, download and process each eBook in a sane manner, while utilising the actual eBook file name, rather than something arbitrary.
• Re^3: searching with mojo dom. Get and parse a value from a messy page in one.
• Re: Parse html file/Re: Parsing incorrect html. Dealing with weird/invalid source data.

Modern perl has some fantastic alternatives to older tools/methods which are really worth exploring. Please let us know if you have any follow on questions.

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