I realize you said you were a novice, so the other monks that have answered your question may have you going in the right direction. However, as a novice, if you're trying to learn what these programs are doing, and follow how the variables are changing, then the debugger is definitely the way to go.

I would recommend the GUI based Perl debugger for doing what you're after. You can find it here. Do realize that it's only going to process one program at a time, but it will allow you to watch all the variables, how they change, and hopefully allow you to follow the program flow and what's going on.

Hope that helps!