You're banging your head against a brick wall, I'm afraid. The Perl community doesn't appear to care less when PHP leaps ahead in popularity with web developers. See "What sets Perl Back" which I posted in Meditations a couple of weeks ago. CPAN is Perl's killer app and also it's Achilles heel. CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS.pm have a long way to go before they can be called end-user apps. You have to ask why there is only one book on Perl and MySQL (Dubois) and why it wasn't reissued - because there wasn't enough interest in the first edition. The book's brilliant but a lot of the Perl community seem to think web development is beneath them.