Well, let's take a look. $self within first_name is scoped locally. It is set to a blessed ref of class Test which is passed to first_name as a parameter. On the next line, you change $self to an anonymous hash with the values contained within @_. In the process, you lose the blessed ref and thus are no longer working with your object. Therefore, you lose your data once you leave the sub. Try something like this instead:

sub first_name {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{'first'} = shift;
    return "First Name: $self->{first}\n";
}
[download]

And call it like this:

$test->first_name("bill");
[download]

Hope this helps. Note that you need to do this to last_name as well.

antirice    
The first rule of Perl club is - use Perl
The ith rule of Perl club is - follow rule i - 1 for i > 1

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.